THE FALL OF ROME

He shouldn’t have worn sneakers. That was a mistake. A shower would have helped, too. Why could he never remember that skipping a shower didn’t lend him a feeling of rebelliousness, as his mirror would like to have him think, but only made him feel slimy, insecure? Conner stopped to retie his shoelace in front of the library. The library was closed now, as were the dining halls, the student center, and the university bookstore; a week ago Conner had sold back his books for Professor Palma’s course, Ancient Rome. Forty-one dollars and ninety-three cents. Conner felt guilty for selling these, and so had kept The Twelve Caesars by way of apology. He’d imagined Professor Palma watching him from a hidden window, nodding.

The campus in summer had always pleased Conner. He walked through the rose garden watered, dusted, and weeded only for him, it seemed, and across the quad, where frisbees no longer sailed; through the memorial tower archway, whose marble crest Conner had never taken the time to read—it was a luxury that he could now, if he wanted to. If he wanted to, he could do just about anything. He stepped out of the way to let a grounds crew pass.

When he entered Professor Palma’s office, the professor greeted him by saying, “Looks like you’ve been shorn.”

“Shorn?”

“Your hair.” Professor Palma gestured Conner to a leather chair. Conner sunk into it, so that his eyes were barely level with Palma’s desk. “You’ve cut off your long hair.”

“Oh,” Conner said. He hadn’t cut his hair. It was odd, seeing Professor Palma seated behind a desk. Conner had never noticed, until now, how mottled his beard was. Up close, you could see patches of red, brown, blond.

“My mother always used to call that a summer cut. Every June she’d take me and my brother to the barbershop. They’d put a wooden board across the chair, to make us higher. Afterwards, we’d get to pick a prize out of a plastic barrel. It was called Joe’s Secret Barrel. How do you like that? Joe’s Secret Barrel.”

“Joe’s Secret Barrel,” Conner said. “Well.” He felt himself smiling his nervous smile.

“Comic books, mostly. And bubble gum. Bazooka Joe.”

What would happen, Conner wondered, if he never got around to asking his question? “Professor Palma,” he said. “I have a small problem I’d like to bring to your attention.”

Professor Palma nodded. “I see.” In class, Professor Palma sometimes steepled his hands across his face in the middle of lectures. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he’d say, “let me submit the following.”

“It’s about my final grade,” Conner said. “You gave me a B-, which I totally understand, because of the midterm and everything, but the thing is—” Conner suddenly had no idea how he was to finish the sentence. How did anyone know how to finish their sentences? Professor Palma was looking at him like he was explaining how to butter toast. “The thing is, I was wondering if there was any way you could change it to a B+.”

Professor Palma drew his lips together and nodded. “I see.”

“I’m really sorry to ask,” Conner said. “I know how annoying grade change requests can be. That’s why I didn’t email you about it. I thought a meeting would be better.” He offered a clumsy smile.

“A meeting,” Professor Palma said.

“Right.”

“Face to face. Mono e mono.” Professor Palma chopped the air with his hand.

Conner nodded. Behind Professor Palma, he noticed a bulletin board crammed with postcards, cartoons, photographs. In the largest photograph, Professor Palma was standing atop a windy mountain, a woman beside him, a little girl in a pink baseball cap clutching Professor Palma’s leg.

“I’m not quite sure where to begin,” Professor Palma said.

“I’m sorry,” Conner said. “I’m only asking because I think my participation towards the end of the semester really picked up and I didn’t miss a class all year and,”  Conner felt himself losing some sort of advantage, “and if I get a B+ I’ll be able to go to the honors graduation ceremony next year.” Why did he always say more than he wished? He felt his face grow warm. “My parents are coming,” he added, idiotically.

“Well, that’s quite a lot for us to think about, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

Professor Palma next addressed his fingers, which were quite large, Conner noticed. “Please know that I’m not in the habit of giving grade changes, although my students seem to be forever in the habit of asking for them.”

“I know.”

“Students seem to think that a grade is something negotiable. I’m not sure why this is,” Professor Palma said, then raised one eyebrow, “but I have my theories.”

Conner, expecting one, was surprised when the professor only opened his desk drawer and rummaged through. The open drawer gave off a smell of chalk dust and damp wood. “As I was saying, I have my theories. A part of me wonders if the feeling of negotiability arises from a student’s sense of entitlement, a problem I’ve wrestled with all my academic life, but more in recent years. I wonder if there’s a new breed of student on the rise, quick and on the make, philosophically opposed to failure, but morally blind to failure’s lessons. Do you see what I mean?”

“Mmm.”

“And another part of me wonders if, as students evolve, as a university certainly hopes they will, their thinking evolves too, and, attendant to this growth—I think of it as peeking over a high fence, for some reason—is the slow realization that all grades, as all knowledge perhaps is, are inherently subjective. Am I right? That question of ‘What really is the difference between a B- and a B+,’ or that nagging question ‘What are the clear, defensible, and unalterable criteria for an A?’”

“Right.” The flesh around Professor Palma’s eyes nurtured a single brown mole. “I see what you’re saying, but it’s more that—”

“The Unanswerable Question!” Professor Palma laughed, as if this had been a joke between them all along.

“Right.”

Outside, two pigeons landed on the sill of Professor Palma’s window. They made a noise like iced tea pouring into tall glasses.

“I wouldn’t ask. Normally, I mean.”

“My wife says I have too many theories about things. A little secret for you to remember: no one knows you better than your wife.”

“Right.”

Professor Palma looked at his watch. “I’m sorry, but I’m meeting someone else at noon.”

“I’m sorry to ask for this,” Conner said. “I really am. But I’m not asking because I think an exception should be made for me.” He tried to read Professor Palma’s expression, but the expression conveyed only imperfect vision, cloudy skies, and a single, unasked question: was it Colin or Conan? “I’m just asking because I think I’ve earned it.”

“Well, I’m sympathetic,” Professor Palma said, “to a point. But you most certainly are asking that an exception be made for you. That’s without debate.” He continued before Conner could point out that one of the pigeons had now made its way inside the office and was currently bobbing towards the glinty magnifying glass atop Professor Palma’s Oxford English Dictionary. “But I suppose that’s the human condition, isn’t it? Thinking an exception will be made for us. Hoping the universe is Godded indeed, and hears our call.”

As if a punchline, the phone rang.

“Excuse me.” Professor Palma picked up the receiver. “Yes, speaking,” he said. “The Camry. Right. Yes, I spoke to Henry about that. I said I spoke to Henry about that. Right.” The pigeon, forgetting the object of its desire, was now sitting just inside the window. It looked at Conner without really looking at him, somehow. Eyes like shrunken pennies. “That’s not what Henry said at all.” The professor shook his head. Was the change of grade form in his desk? Conner wondered. “Well, you’ll have to let me talk to Henry about that,” Professor Palma said. “I said you’ll have to have to let me talk to Henry about that. Right. Fine. Yes, that’s my home number. Right.” He hung up. “Mechanics,” he sighed. “But of what?”

“Professor,” Conner said.

Professor Palma checked his watch again, then pulled a carbon ledger from the desk drawer. “I will keep this with me,” he said, “as a reminder of our meeting.” He filled in a few lines, then folded it in half. “I will keep this with me and think about our meeting.”

Conner felt the advantage swing his way, like a hurled rope. How could he mention that the form needed to be submitted by tomorrow? “Thanks,” Conner said. “There’s just one more little thing. It seems that the deadline—”

At that moment, Professor Palma’s door flew open. A beautiful, impossibly skinny woman entered the room and immediately began swatting the pigeons away with a rolled-up newspaper. “Dirty, filthy birds!” she cried. She knocked into Conner’s chair. “Why do you let them do this, Gerald? Why?”

“Calm down, Magda,” Professor Palma said. “Please.”

Magda closed the OED with a sudden, thunderous clap. “Making filth on these beautiful books. Please to go! Go!” She chased one pigeon out the window, then cornered the other near Professor Palma’s bookcase. The pigeon bobbed its head and spread its ugly wings. For a moment Conner was afraid the pigeon was going to fly around the room, when Magda unrolled the newspaper like an enormous catcher’s mitt and, with one, startling motion, scooped the bird up and deposited it out the window. “There!” she said. She pushed the window down, which screeched to a close. “Filthy birds.”

It would be hard to say that anyone looked attractive scooping a live pigeon into a newspaper, so how had this woman managed to do so? Perhaps it was the breath heaving in her chest, or the way she now brushed her gorgeous, silky hair—it really was silky—from her eyes without the least trace of self-consciousness. Maybe it was the clothes she wore, a white halter top and strangely dark, European-looking jeans, cut low enough to expose her brown stomach, with its taut belly button like a punctuation mark. But, more likely, it was because Conner had been in love with this mysterious woman all semester. Magda. This woman who sat in the front row, challenging Professor Palma with her sharp, angry questions, flipping the pages of her exotic notebook with a barely contained rage, crossing and recrossing her long legs from which expensive-looking, high-heeled shoes dangled, even on snowy days. His friends had a name for her, one of Conner’s inventions. Frenchy.

“Do you know Magda?” Professor Palma said. “Magda, this is—”

“Conner,” Conner said. He shook her hand, which had rings on every finger.

“Magda is helping me on a dig this summer,” Professor Palma said. “In lovely Tunisia.” He laughed like this, too, was some sort of joke.

“Oh,” Conner said.

“These filthy birds, I hate them. Why do you let them have their way, Gerald?”

Professor Palma made a beats me face. “I suppose I’m too soft,” he said.

Magda made a tschh noise, then pulled a spool of tape from her purse and tossed it onto Professor Palma’s desk. “This won’t work,” she said. “They fall down.” She removed a bundle of yellow flyers, half-sheets of paper bound with a rubber band. “Please try something else.”

“Magda is helping me look for volunteers for the dig,” Professor Palma explained.

“Every one, down. I go back, try again, but forget it. Down again.” Magda lifted a stapler from Professor Palma’s desk. “Maybe this,” she said. She tried stuffing the stapler in her purse, but it wouldn’t fit.

“I was just telling Conner that I was on my way to another meeting,” Professor Palma said. “With Dr. Ancusi.”

Magda threw her hands up in the air. “Why? We’re never going to get out of here. Already it’s—” she checked her watch. “Please, come on, Gerald.”

The rope that had once swung so close now made a second appeal. “I could help,” Conner offered. “I mean, with the flyers. It’s no problem.”

Professor Palma looked not at him, but at Magda. “Sounds like you’ve found a volunteer,” he said.

Magda sighed. “Fine,” she said. “If this is how you do it, Gerald.” She handed Conner the stapler. “But we’re leaving soon, right? I’m so hungry.”

“Right,” Professor Palma said. “We’ll meet back here in fifty-five minutes or so.”

“Fifty-five minutes or so,” Magda said. “You American men. Can’t even say ‘an hour’ without covering your tracks.”

When they were about to leave, Professor Palma glanced at Conner and said, “I’ll be thinking about our meeting.”

 

Outside it was getting cloudy. It would be a rainy day after all. How had Conner not noticed the saplings along the college mall offering up their silvery undersides like raised pom-poms? Clouds gathered above the administration building, blanching the gold from its dome. He and Magda walked along the mall, where work crews were repairing the pedestrian walkway, whose intricate brickwork had always secretly pleased Conner. He liked it that the university lavished so much attention on his walk home, to the dining hall, to the classrooms where he was so often a star.

“Already they fall apart,” Magda said. She kicked a small stone a remarkable distance. “A quarter million dollars, for what?”

“Yeah,” Conner said. “It’s crazy.” He had already given up on flirting, from the moment Magda descended the history department stairs in twos and threes, leaving him to his hurried, but cautious single steps behind her. But maybe he’d given up too soon. Although it was growing darker, Magda donned a pair of enormous yellow sunglasses.

“This whole place is crazy,” she said. “Look!” She pointed to the workmen walking the scaffolding outside the geology building. “The whole place falls down. They throw money away on nothing!”

Conner nodded. Listening to Magda, with her waving arms and mirrored lenses, was like being scolded by a gorgeous, fantastic insect. “I know,” he said. “This place drives me crazy.”

They separated to place flyers on the notice boards flanking the walkway entrance. The boards were freckled with concert notices, sublet announcements, weeks out of date. It saddened Conner to think of the old notices; he didn’t like their suggestion of empty apartments, darkened stages, of good times long gone. He stapled Professor Palma’s flyers atop posters for free condoms. Want To Earn $$$ AND Discover The World? the flyers began. Conner couldn’t imagine Professor Palma thinking up the dollar signs. Maybe those were Magda’s idea.

She returned to him now, and began her conversation again as if no time had passed whatsoever. “They throw away what is worth keeping and keep everything that is junk. Junk!” She ran ahead to the next board and stapled three flyers in the time it took Conner to staple one. “This is a junk place, right? Just look around. Tell me this isn’t!” Before Conner could answer, Magda grabbed a handful of his flyers and began stapling them to a large tree.

“Uh, I don’t think you’re supposed to do that,” Conner said.

Magda turned an angry look on him. “Why?” She punctuated her question with a punch of the stapler. “Why should we care when they don’t? Tell me why.”

“Well—” Do not say, Because I like these trees. “Because I don’t think that’s what Professor Palma wants.”

“Ha!” Magda said. She ran ahead to the next tree and stapled another flyer. “There! That’s what Professor Palma wants.”

Conner, sensing whatever chances he had of gaining Magda’s interest slipping beyond his reach, grabbed one of the tree flyers and tore it in half. “I don’t think so,” he said. He stuffed the torn flyer into his pocket.

Magda looked at him with what seemed new respect, he thought. “Ha!” she said, then raced to another tree, stapling two flyers at once.

“Not the trees,” Conner said. He tore the flyers down, but Magda only laughed and darted across the quad, where a grounds crew was distributing mulch beneath a bronze statue of Thomas Jefferson. The Jefferson Garden was intended to make Jefferson look deep in pastoral contemplation, but somehow conveyed the sense that he was horribly lost and preposterously overdressed, a wedding guest wandering from a wrecked car. When Magda passed the crew, the three crew members stopped working, gawked. “I’d run too, boy!” one of them called to Conner. Conner turned to acknowledge him, but only caught Jefferson’s bronzed gaze.

“You have very high morals,” Magda said when Conner reached her. She swiped the rest of Conner’s flyers from his hands. “You are a moral person, right?” She laughed, then stapled a clumsy row of flyers along a low tree branch. “A good boy.”

Conner was about to contradict her, when the clouds opened up and rain began to fall. He pulled the flyers from the branch. “It’s starting to rain,” he said.

“But not on you,” Magda laughed. She kept stapling the branch, testing him. “Not on the perfect student.”

I’m not the perfect student, Conner wanted to say, but, in a way, he was. He had a high grade point average, arrived early to every class, pledged the best fraternity, volunteered to lead blood drives, food donations, Toys for Tots. Would you like to lead this class? one professor had written across the bottom of his essay exam. Let me know when you need a letter of recommendation—please! But, for all his other successes, Conner had failed to gain Professor Palma’s admiration. Every day, he’d sat in the front row, taking copious notes, raising his hand to nearly every question. He’d memorized whole passages from Suetonius, and occasionally worked these into his responses, hoping Professor Palma would recognize them, but Professor Palma only nodded, dismissing him. “Yes, well, there’s that, of course,” he’d say, then call on someone else, his gaze passing over Conner like a swift cloud. When Magda spoke, Professor Palma nodded enthusiastically, said, “Yes, right. Good observation,” or, most aggravating to Conner, “That’s perfectly said.” Each week Conner kept a private count of who had raised their hand more often, him or Magda, making sure to keep ahead. Now, he watched her staple another flyer to a sapling still tied by ropes, and wondered if she and Professor Palma were sleeping together.

“We should get out of this rain,” Conner said.

Magda ignored him. “Who cares if it rains?” she said.

“Well, I’m going back.”

Magda turned to face him, revealing, for the first time, the outline of her breasts through her rain-soaked shirt. She smiled a crooked smile. “So, go back, then,” she said. There were tiny beads of rain on her sunglasses, like jewels. It began to pour.

Conner was deciding whether he really wanted to leave or not—what did that smile mean?—when Magda broke into a sprint and ran to the Jefferson statue, where the grounds crew had since fled. Conner followed her without trying to appear to. Magda was eyeing the Jefferson statue for a likely staple spot, when she took one flyer and speared it over Jefferson’s bronze quill. The flyer sagged in the rain, but Magda had places for others: the points of Jefferson’s three-corner hat, his pondering finger—raised, as if asking a question—even, against all physics, the tip of his nose. Conner stood behind her, watching her handiwork. Then he stepped closer and found himself touching her shoulder, her damp, exciting shoulder. “Magda,” he said. But Magda sped away, laughing. Conner followed.

“You made him into a clown,” Conner said, when he reached her under the memorial tower archway. He wanted his tone to be conspiratorial, but it came out as an accusation. He could not catch his breath. Magda was watching the rain, her arms hugged to her chest. She shrugged. “This place makes lots of clowns.” They stood that way for a while, not talking. Conner wondered whether he’d done the right thing, touching her, then felt angry at himself for worrying about that. Why wouldn’t Magda face him?

“Do you know they want to get rid of Professor Palma?” Magda said.

“They do?”

Magda nodded. “They say they want him to retire, but they just want him out.”

“Oh.”

“But Gerald wants to stay. He wants to stay, but they want him to leave.” Magda made a noise that Conner thought might mean tears, but when Magda faced him, she was not crying. “It’s crazy. Even his wife—his own wife!—wants him to leave. Can you believe it? For what? So she can play golf and drive a big car. Gerald would die living that way. Can you see him playing golf?”

Conner could very well see him playing golf—he was surprised he didn’t already, actually—but shook his head no.

“No,” Magda said. “But his wife—” she waved her hand. “Don’t let’s talk about her.”

Conner stepped close enough that he could see the gooseflesh of Magda’s damp arms. A thin bracelet clung to her wrist, made entirely of string. In class, she sometimes pared a large apple with a small knife while Conner watched, the lecture a sudden jumble of slides and maps, Professor Palma’s voice a radio from a passing car. “I’m sorry,” Conner said.

“For what?” Magda said, then began to cry. When Conner placed a hand on her shoulder, Magda pushed it aside. “You shouldn’t pay attention to a woman’s tears,” she said. She walked to the other side of the archway, peering out at the rain falling across the quad. At times, the rain blew in from the archway, but Magda did not move to the middle where Conner stood, so he wondered if he should approach her again.

“I’m so hungry,” Magda said, to no one in particular.

“Yeah,” Conner said. Once, he’d followed Magda after class. Just for a few moments, until she turned towards south campus, walking against the traffic lights, her notebook clutched beneath her arm. Conner stopped at the light, feeling suddenly ridiculous and creepy. What was he doing?

“I’m so sick of this,” Magda said, but Conner couldn’t tell if she meant the rain or university or something else altogether. But he knew one thing, and it was a surprise to him: he was about to approach Magda and put his arms around her, gently, if she would have him. If she would have him, he would lean in for a kiss.

“I’m so sick of waiting,” Magda said. She wiped her eyes. “I really am.” And, before Conner could reach her, she was off running again, through the rain and across the quad, puddles exploding from her feet. Conner hesitated, then followed. Thank God, he thought, as he reached the history department, where the door was still flung open wide, rain blowing in. Thank God I didn’t.

 

Conner found them in Professor Palma’s office, Professor Palma donning an enormous raincoat thirty years out of style. Magda was behind him, looping a thick belt through the coat, straightening the shoulders.

“Rain gear,” Professor Palma said. “Ah, who knows the caprices of the weather?”

“Please keep still,” Magda said. She reached the belt around him, then tightened it in the front. “You move, it’s not going to work.”

“I’m under strict orders, as you can see,” Professor Palma said. He had his arms raised like a child.

“I see,” Conner said.

“I was just telling Magda, as it turns out I didn’t have a meeting at all,” Professor Palma said. “I had my days mixed up.”

Magda clicked her tongue. “You get everything mixed up, Gerald.”

“I make no argument. Guilty as charged,” Professor Palma laughed. Conner offered a weak smile. How good it would feel to leave this office. How good it would be to leave this campus. Why had he come here in the first place? “But I’ll have you know I made a nice hour of it, listening to the rain and catching up on my reading. It’s a fortunate day when I can find the time to catch up on my reading.”

Conner was about to mention the deadline for the grade change, when Magda pulled a floppy rain hat down over Professor Palma’s ears. “There,” she said.

“Well,” Professor Palma said, “as you can see, it looks like we’re about to depart.” Magda placed a folded umbrella in his hand. “Whose is this?” he asked.

“Yours,” Magda said. “Let’s go, Gerald. I’m so hungry.”

“We’re going to eat,” Professor Palma said, “but I’ll be thinking about our meeting, won’t I, Colin?”

“Thanks,” Conner said.

“Gerald,” Magda said. She tugged his sleeve.

“You can leave the rest of the flyers on my desk,” Professor Palma said. “I hope I can trust you to close the door behind you until it clicks, if you don’t mind. We seem to be having a small food emergency here.”

Magda pulled Professor Palma out the door. “Oh, he’s very trustworthy,” she said. “He’s got high morals.”

Professor Palma seemed not to hear. He gave one last look at Conner, his smiling head pinched between the folds of his rain hat, a look that conveyed how happy he was to be bundled in his coat, a meal on the way, the pleasure he took in being someone who could be looked after and adored, whose most minor requests were matters of consequence, someone who, despite all his years, still mattered, who deeply, deeply mattered. “Until it clicks,” he said.

Conner stood in the office until he could no longer hear their footsteps. The rain beat against the windowpanes, closed now. He placed the flyers on the desk and was about to leave the office when he saw a solitary piece of paper in the trash can. The grade change form, still folded in the middle. Conner unfolded it to find that Professor Palma hadn’t filled in a thing, except, absurdly, his signature at the bottom. The signature was oversized, nearly illegible. Conner folded the form into his pocket.

And it wasn’t his walk across the rainy campus that perplexed Conner, nor was handing the slip to the woman at the registrar’s office, who barely read it over while chewing a pen, nor was it the ease with which he’d found himself saying, “It’s an A,” when she asked what grade to enter—none of these things troubled Conner on his walk home. Only this: why, with all the rain shading them from the world, with its sudden loan of permission, why hadn’t he the courage to kiss Magda?

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Story THE GLASS MOUNTAIN

“Quiet, now,” she told us. “It’s like Tinker Bell.”

“What’s like Tinker Bell?” Gnome asked. It was a stupid question, but we forgave him because his eyes were the color of a sandstorm, and he sat still as an injured bird.

“If you don’t believe, it won’t come true.” Aunt Halina was patient with these types of questions. She wasn’t really our aunt. She smelled like melted butter, and she had a scar on her chest that she wouldn’t let us see. She started the story again.

“The glass mountain is very far from here, but you can find it if you know where to look. Past the dirt road that forks toward the empty sea, past the tree whose white flowers yawn open for the moon. Past the stone pillar shaped like a monk. If you are faithful, the mountain will let you find it.”

Eva and I had heard the story at least seven hundred times. It was our favorite. We even liked it better than the ones Halina told about her dead husband, Fillip, who had worked on a barge, and the parties they had floating in the middle of the river. Gnome, on the other hand, was new. He sat on an upside-down bucket, holding his breath, listening to the sounds of the world getting dark. We were jealous of his hearing the story for the first time. Eva picked a daddy longlegs off the screen door and dropped it on his shoulder.

“Does it break?” he asked. He cupped the spider in his palm and released it into the grass. Eva pouted.

“It doesn’t break,” Halina pronounced solemnly.

“Are there princes?” he asked.

“The princes all die, you know,” I told him.

Halina put on her splinter face, and it stuck inside me until I squirmed. “Hanna exaggerates,” she said. “She’s not to be trusted. She doesn’t believe.” She leaned in close to Gnome and put her hands on his sunburned cheeks. “Do you believe, little Gnome?”

“Yes,” he said. “I believe.” His ears were kind of pointy, and out of all of us, he was the one who looked like he belonged in a fairytale.

Eva let her head plunk against my shoulder. The stars were blinking awake in the summer blue sky, egged on by crickets and lovelorn frogs.

“We’ll begin again,” Halina said. “The glass mountain is very far from here.”

 

The glass mountain was just a story, but we pretended to believe it so Halina would tell it over and over again until we felt like we understood. The story went like this . . .

Sometimes you didn’t know you were at the glass mountain until you walked into it. The townspeople used to find it by the smell of dead birds at its base, but at some point the birds learned to fly around it. The glass mountain was smooth and heartless and perfect. At the top, a princess lived in an enchanted castle, hidden by the clouds. The princess didn’t have a name. Of course, she had a name before, but when the witch flew her up to the castle, she cast a spell. If the princess ever spoke her name again, the castle would shatter. Glass would rain down on the people she loved—her mother, her father, her sweet, tone-deaf sister whose lap had always been her pillow.

In front of the princess’s castle, the witch planted a tree with white apples. She sent a sparrow down to the town with a message—if any man could make it to the top of the mountain and pick one of the apples, the princess would be saved. The witch wasn’t jealous of the princess’s beauty, though the princess’s hair was made of crushed moonlight and her eyes were violet-bright. The witch was under a curse and had not slept in seven years. One afternoon, the princess wandered into the witch’s field and fell asleep in the goldteller flowers. The princess didn’t wake until the witch had her in midair.

 

Part of the reason I loved this story was that I related to the witch. While Eva would fall asleep during a five-minute car ride to the grocery store, I stayed up nights staring at the ceiling of my bedroom, turning the dripping spackle into shapes and characters, creating stories about an evil school bus driver who captured children and drove them to the forest where she kept a secret lair. Some nights I pretended to be sleepwalking, and I’d wander out of the house and into the yard, feeling my way past the trees blindly, arms extended, mouth half open and drooling. Which is how I discovered Gnome, a few weeks after he moved in next door with his father, curled up in our garden and watching me silently.

 

The rescue missions were constant and ill-fated. A knight would ride his horse partway up the mountain’s slick surface then slide back down and break his neck. The men of the town dug a mass grave nearby, but the bodies of the horses were too big to fit. Inside the windows of the princess’s castle, fingerprints and nose smudges accumulated. The witch cursed her with sleeplessness, and she sat, listening to the high, harsh scratching of the glass, the screams of the horses, the dull thuds when men and animals landed on the ground. She wished they would just stop trying. She wished she could lay her head in her sister’s lap and sleep.

 

Gnome’s mother had died of lymphoma the year before he moved next door, and his father, a brisk and obsessively neat lawyer, didn’t like stories. He thought they were indulgent and, more importantly, useless, since they were incapable of beating back grief. Gnome’s mother had always used different voices when she’d told him stories, and sometimes she’d even made shadow puppets to highlight the most dramatic scenes, such as when little boys fought ooze-dripping monsters and won using the improbable technique of running through the monsters’ legs. Gnome told me all this under the tent created by an overhang of ivy off the side of his garage, a place infested with mosquitoes due to stagnant water trapped in warped gutters, a place where it was impossible to sleep and where night after night we tried.

Eva, with her easy sleepiness, was banned from the spaces that Gnome and I inhabited. I held tight to the excuse that she was too young and the tent was too small, but the truth was that I was jealous of my time with Gnome, just as I was jealous of my time with my sister. I was careful to guard against overlap, protective of what belonged to me alone. Eva didn’t know of Gnome’s desperate fear of hospitals, the way he turned pale and sweaty when he heard his mother’s name. Just as Gnome didn’t know of Eva’s dreamlife, the way that in her dreams she slept behind glass, the way that this was peaceful for her.

Eventually, Gnome’s father started dating a woman with eyes and hair that matched his dead wife’s, got remarried, and moved Gnome away from me, but for a few summers, at least, he was mine, curling at night like a fern against my body as we hunkered down in the green scents of our hideout. I even let him tattoo a mountain on my back with a safety pin and a licorice-scented marker, let him carve me with pinpricks that ascended toward my neck. When my back got infected a week later and landed me in the hospital on IV antibiotics, Gnome didn’t come to visit. I told Eva that the pain was worse than anything else in the world, so she would blow on my skin when it started itching. When the scabs fell away and uncovered the scars, I missed the hot salve of her breath.

 

In seven years, only one knight came close to saving the princess. He arrived in golden armor, and in the sunlight, he looked like a man made of fire. The princess bowed her head when she heard him charge, but the sound she expected, the sound of gold kissing glass, was replaced by the sound of horse hooves cracking their way closer. From her window, it looked like the knight was riding on sky, and he leaned forward, readying his burning body to pluck an apple from the tree. Just as he approached the peak, the witch, who had turned herself into a hawk, sailed down and sunk her talons between his horse’s eyes. The horse fought for only a moment before it began its downward slide, its hooves engraving the mountainside with a deep furrow.

The princess listened as the townspeople began digging a new grave. She lay her head against the window and closed her eyes.

 

Eva became obsessed with saving things. I tried to tell Aunt Halina that the story was going to kill my sister, but by then she’d decided I was not a reliable source of information. Eva’s crusades were always huge in scope, limited only by the shortness of her legs and her attention span. She once spent the entire month of June going door-to-door and asking people not to kill bugs they found inside their houses, to instead scoop them up with a newspaper and release them outside. The summer she was eight I convinced her that the clouds were going to retire at the end of the year, and she tried to build a ladder tall enough to reach them, to try to talk some sense into them. That was the summer she broke her leg.

 

In the winter of the seventh year, a young man arrived at the glass mountain at dawn. His shirt was dirty, and his pants were shredded over his left hip. He didn’t have a horse, but he’d tied the claws of a wildcat to his hands and feet. As he stood at the base of the mountain and pressed his pale forehead against its cool surface, the townspeople crowded together and gossiped. He was much too small to have killed a wildcat. He was so skinny a wildcat wouldn’t eat him. Death by a wildcat would be a kinder fate than death by the mountain.

It began to snow. The young man smiled, blushed, and started climbing. A thin layer of glistening white settled on the glass so that the outline of the mountain was clear against the horizon. The young man’s movements were slow and careful—first one hand, then the other, then each foot behind him. This was going to take a long time, the townspeople thought. They wrapped themselves in blankets and got comfortable.

When night came the young man could go no further. The glass was too steep, and he was tired. His hands were crusted with a thin layer of frozen blood from where the claws had worked into his skin. In the morning, he thought, he’d just let go, let gravity carry him down to the pretty white grave below. But tonight, for one night, he would hook his claws on a glass ledge and sleep. He dreamt of falling through the glass and landing on the mountain’s inside. He dreamt of shattering glass and the sky rushing up around him.

At midnight he was woken by the calls of a hawk flying down from the apple tree to inspect the shadows. Hunching his shoulders, the young man braced himself for the waking sensation of talon tearing through flesh, and when the bird had him fully pierced, he reached upward, releasing the wildcat claws and holding tight to the bird as it carried him up toward the castle. At the apple tree, the hawk swooped down, heavy with the young man’s weight. He had dreamed of this too. He pulled his father’s knife from his pocket, sliced cleanly through the bird’s woody legs, and fell through the silvered branches to the ground.

 

The rest of the story—the young man throwing his white apple at the dragon and freeing the princess—we hardly cared about, fixed as we were on the moment when he plucked the splinters of bird feet from the unraveling skin of his shoulders. But Gnome wanted more of the story, more and more, until he was so full on it he could finally curl up and sleep.

“Then what happened?” he kept asking.

Aunt Halina indulged him, telling him how the body of the hawk was found days later in a neighboring town, telling him how the dead knights came back to life at the bottom of the mountain, mounted their dusty horses, and rode off with their shining armor into the winter light.

Eva had fallen asleep by this point, her melon-heavy head in my lap, her lips blowing kisses at the sky. “Why didn’t the mountain ever shatter?”

Aunt Halina would answer questions about anything, all the hard ones that our parents would ignore, about her dead husband, our dead dog, the dead baby that was found in a dumpster that we weren’t supposed to know about.

This question stumped her.

 

When Halina died, years later, I was in college, where my sleeplessness had grown deeper and settled in under my eyes. A few days after her funeral, I got two letters in the mail, which I took to the basement physics lab where I worked as a research assistant. A tree had recently fallen against the building, damaging the ventilation ducts in the basement, and the ducts that had been rerouted into our lab carried with them the smell of outside, frozen grass and rotten leaves that were thawing and cooking in the steam heat. I’d been up all night talking to Eva, who was wearing headscarves and stringing her apartment with Christmas lights in Halina’s honor.

The first letter was really a postcard from Gnome stuffed inside an envelope with a postmark from Chicago, where he was in law school. I read it absently, wondering how he’d heard, if his ears had finally rounded out, if he’d turned out handsome and well-rested. I hadn’t seen him in almost eight years, although we’d been writing to each other, sporadically, since the summer he moved away. I read the card a few times before I finally caught his postscript: I hate law school. Every time I dream about you, I wake to the sound of shattering glass.

The other letter was from Halina, sent by the executor of her will, and it smelled like melted butter when I opened it. She’d left me a box of seeds she’d dried from her flower garden, a photo album filled with pictures of her as a young woman, wearing scandalous dresses and dancing on a barge, and her wedding ring. She’d also left me a key I was supposed to give to Gnome. Tell him he was my favorite, she’d written. And tell Eva she was my favorite. You were also my favorite.

I smelled the letter for as long as it took me to start crying, which was longer than it should have. My eyes had been awake too long, and they were reluctant to produce tears even when I told them to.

 

Eva died three months later. She’d come down with a fever in Puerto Rico, where she’d been busy with her new crusade of saving the baby sea turtles, and by the time the doctors had found the welt from the spider bite in her armpit, there was little they could do. Gnome showed up at my apartment two days later, his body slim and drooping like a willow tree, wearing a tie and sunglasses and carrying a vase filled with ivy. He offered to go to the airport and wait for her body to arrive. He offered to drive me to the funeral.

“Where are your things?” I asked him.

“I didn’t bring any,” he said.

The Puerto Rican funeral parlor hadn’t put any makeup on her, and when they opened the casket at the funeral home, her skin was covered with purple splotches that fanned out like spiderwebs. My parents left the room. Because Gnome put his hands on my shoulders, I tried to stay calm and resist the urge to vomit. I wanted to give the director instructions—make her look natural, not too much rouge or lipstick, no blue eye shadow—but I couldn’t.

“She’ll need something else to wear,” he said. They’d sent her to us in what looked like a tie-dyed bathing suit cover-up. “Do you have any of her clothes? Are you the same size?”

I couldn’t speak. All I could hear was shattering, and when I opened my mouth, no words came out. We’d never been the same size, but in my mind, I slipped on her clothes, her swollen skin, her spider bite.

“I’ll bring something this afternoon,” Gnome said. Then he reached across me and closed the casket.

 

After the funeral Gnome disappeared for a week. When he came back, he had a tent and a sleeping bag strapped to his back.

“I forgot to give you your key,” I told him.

“I dropped out of law school,” he said.

“Are you going somewhere?”

“I’m going to go find it,” he said.

“Find what?”

“The mountain.”

The sun was setting behind him, and I squinted my eyes and looked for a line of glass in the distance. All that I saw was red light flooding the doorway and the glowing outline of Gnome’s darkened body. I was tired.

“Come with me,” he said. “I want you to come with me.”

When I turned to go inside, I had to step over the failing branches of his shadow, tilted in a puddle of purple red light. He waited in the doorway while I gathered my things.

 

We headed west. It was already dark when we left, so after a few hours of driving, we pulled off onto an abandoned road and found a patchy forest to camp in. The ground smelled like burnt wood, and the dew crept up around the tent while we drank cheap whiskey to keep warm. With the wind blowing in the branches above us, it sounded like the trees were singing.

“She always had a crush on you, you know.”

“Who?” Gnome asked. “Eva?”

“She used to put apples outside her bedroom door before she went to sleep, in case you came at night to rescue her.”

His face screwed up, and I could tell that it upset him to hear this, but I kept talking, telling my sister’s stories, listening as her name filled the dark spaces between us, until I felt too tired to talk anymore.

Neither of us expected to fall asleep, so Gnome took out a can of Sterno, and we roasted marshmallows and ate them until they made us sick. Part of me kept expecting him to lean over and kiss me, even though it was only partly what I wanted. I’d kissed Gnome before, a million times, behind a curtain of ivy, with bugs crawling up our legs and biting us. I wanted it and didn’t want it the way I wanted and didn’t want physical pain. Just before the Sterno burned out, Gnome pulled up a pantleg to examine a mosquito bite, and I suddenly wished that I had shared him with Eva, wished that I had shared them with each other. I was waiting for the light to go out so I could cry.

I didn’t really want Gnome to kiss me. I wanted him to let me sleep in his lap like a sister.

 

Day two on the road we ate raw potatoes from a vegetable stand. A hummingbird flew in through the rear passenger-side window and rammed its tiny, panicked body into my headrest until I shooed it out with a newspaper. Gnome got an angry call from his father, so we found a nice, quiet river, made a little boat from sticks and leaves, and sent the phone sailing away from us.

“I would’ve been a terrible lawyer,” he said. “I’m too gullible.” Then he added, “Not like you.”

The breeze gave out, and through the water, we could see a wreath of minnows encircle the makeshift raft, until the phone started ringing and the vibrations made it capsize.

“It’s not so different,” I said.

“What?”

“You believe in things that couldn’t possibly be true, like Halina’s stories. I believe in things that sound like they couldn’t possibly be true, but they are. Dark matter. An expanding universe. I believe in alternate dimensions.”

Gnome stared into the water for a minute as his phone sent up bubbles like a cartoon fish. “That’s a start,” he said.

The next day we gave up on direction and took roads based solely on their names. Rabbit Hash Road. Bliss Boulevard. Lonesome Highway. We counted roadkill and hitchhikers and honked when we saw someone litter. Through the open windows, it felt like summer. We talked about home and the nights when we had known each other. We talked about Eva and the things she’d never get to save. We compared the sunburns on our forearms and breathed the sticky air.

At sunset, we drove into a lumberjack festival. From the car, as we approached the river, all we could see above the crowd was a line of men running on the water. Gnome reached over and grabbed my hand.

We made it just in time to see the chopping competition, the men hacking fiercely at their piles of wood, and we browsed through the winning stumps from the chainsaw carving competition. Gnome bought us T-shirts and homemade sausages, and we sat at a picnic table with a family who didn’t have nearly as much awe for the festivities as we did.

“If you think this is something, you should drive out to Spangler,” the woman said. From her cooler she dispensed juice boxes to her writhing sons and a beer to her husband. “They have an arboretum with all the weeping trees you could ever imagine.”

“I can burp the alphabet,” the younger boy announced.

“Jacob.” The father made an unpleasant face but went back to his sandwich when Gnome started belching the alphabet backwards.

“They built the whole thing around these Japanese trees called star magnolias. They don’t know how they got there, but they’ve been there for ages. Huge flowers, like blown up softballs.”

“White flowers?” I asked.

Gnome wasn’t listening, distracted by the eruption of a war sound from the other side of the crowd. The boys shot up and began tugging their father’s arms.

“It’s the Super Chain,” he said. “They rig up a chainsaw with a motorcycle engine.” He signed to his wife that he was taking the boys to go see it. Gnome trailed off behind them.

“White flowers?” I had to yell to be heard.

“It’s in Spangler,” she shouted. “A couple miles past the Stone Monk. Just stop and ask for directions. People around here are friendly.”

 

We were driving again, avoiding the question I would’ve asked before we left, had I actually thought we would find the place. What would we do when we got there? Gnome had returned from the chainsaw exhibition with mild hearing loss and a glinty axe whose handle was stained with hand sweat.

“Hold it,” he’d shouted, placing it in my hands. “It’s heavy.”

Behind us, dust bloomed wide across the road. We drove with the music off, bracing ourselves for what we could brace ourselves for. When we found the Stone Monk, we got out of the car and stood back from the tourists and their pictures. Neither of us had brought a camera. The monk’s head was pointing downward, in a pose of apology or shame.

At the arboretum, Gnome took a white flower from a star magnolia and hooked it through my hair. I felt shy about plucking flowers from the tree, so I gathered them from the ground and dropped them in my purse. For a moment, I thought I’d press one in a book and send it to Eva, and then I remembered. The petals left white dust on my fingers. They smelled like crushed moonlight, the way I’d imagined it to smell, after traveling through cold space to squeeze though curtains of ivy.

“Where does this road go?” Gnome asked a man with a rake.

“Landfill,” the man told him. “Where the lake used to be. The road keeps going, I think, but I wouldn’t drive that way without a gas mask.”

“What do you think?” Gnome asked, back in the car.

“Landfill or bust,” I told him.

He reached up and adjusted the flower behind my ear, and I could see that he was afraid. I wasn’t sure if he was afraid that we would find the thing or that we wouldn’t. Most likely, he was afraid of the same thing I was—the wakeful space that would come after.

“Drive,” I told him.

 

The glass mountain is very far from here, past the dirt road, past the empty sea, past the stone monk with his eyes that look like mourning. The glass mountain is smooth and heartless and perfect.

Inside the car, it smelled awful. Outside the car, it smelled worse. We stood together and pressed our hands against the glass, so cool, so quiet, so beautiful. I wished Eva were there to see it. I was tired, and I wished Eva were there, so I could sleep.

Gnome got his axe from the car and stood at the base, staring up at all that glass. His eyes looked tired. There was no castle at the top. The mountain had brought us to it, and we stood there, obedient, waiting to find out what happened next.

Gnome raised the axe over his head. His name wasn’t Gnome, but I had found him in our garden.

I was afraid that if I said Gnome’s real name, everything would shatter.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Story YEGUAS Y CABALLOS

It was late in the night but Larry sat on the old church pew that served for the bench on their porch and he watched the great cumulonimbus flare out over the plains, anviling tall into the night. The thunder came rolling over the creosote, as though somewhere out in that darkness a colossus stood billowing canvas out from him far into the heavy storm air. The first gusts of wind were just reaching the porch and he drank out of an old crockware pitcher full of mescal that Luis had brought him. The downdraft hit the house and Larry’s hat blew off and landed on the ground and the smell of rain came in rich and deep on the wind. The first drops began sounding on the tin roof of the house and Larry thought with his insides warm from the alcohol that it was fitting that there be storm outside as there was storm inside and he fell asleep out on the old church pew with the mescal on the ground beside him.

 

He was in the kitchen early, the darkness still filling the house, and his flour-covered hands moved back and forth over the yellow Formica countertops, setting the coffee to boil and mixing the batter white to amber gold. He took a knife and cut a section of butter and dropped it into the cast-iron skillet, watched it fall into itself, then turned and poured batter from an old tin cup into the sizzling grease. The bubbles began coming up through the batter, and he flipped the hotcakes in the skillet and waited for the other side to brown.

When he had two neat stacks of cakes, he covered them with towels and pulled a match from his shirt pocket and lit the oven, setting it to a low heat. He put the cakes in the oven and walked back towards their room, his boots clicking softly against the old wood floors. He sat beside her on the bed, passing his rough hands gently over the skin of her face until she awoke.

“Morning,” he said.

She moved out from under his hand and sat up in the bed.

“I made us some breakfast if you want to eat with me before you go.”

“Alright,” she whispered.

She looked at him sadly and got out of bed and he rose with her, wrapping her in a blanket and holding her beside him, her brown hair twisted gently in his hand.

They ate quietly for a while and finally he put his fork down beside his plate.

“You don’t have to do this.”

“Yes, I do. I have to.”

He was quiet, the muscles in his jaw bunching and releasing under his lean skin as he chewed. His stomach was sinking.

“No, you really don’t,” he said. “I’m goin’ to work here in a second. I guess I’ll see you around, huh?”

“No, you probably won’t.”

“What are you goin’ to tell the girls?”

“I’m not telling them anything.”

“Just like that then? Drop them at school and be gone.”

She didn’t say anything.

“What am I goin’ to tell them?”

She looked off through the window at the graying dawn in the yard and past that to where the horizon was beginning to become more definite, the eastern edge glowing at the hastenings of the sun.

“You’ll think of something,” she said.

He took her plate and his and he walked over to the sink and placed them both down into the water where they rang dully against the pan and the silverware and he washed off his hands and dried them on a rag hanging from the oven. He walked back to the table where she sat wrapped in the blanket that had been on his father and mother’s bed before his and he kissed her head a last time.

“I’m always gonna love you, you know that, right?”

“No, you’ll forget. Soon enough.”

“No,” he said looking at her. He looked at her for a long time. “No, I won’t.”

He walked towards the door, pulling the keys to his truck out of his pocket and taking his hat from the hook on the wall. He turned back and looked at her.

“Where you gonna be?”

She didn’t say anything. She just looked away. He stood with his hand on the wooden door frame looking at her then he turned and walked out.

He got up into the truck and turned the keys in the ignition and waited until the orange glow plug light went off, then he put his head against his hands on the steering wheel and sat. He sat for a long time and he thought he could see inside of himself, the mesquite wood around his heart darkening, the coals fading. He was afraid that what life there was in him might leave entire, and he willed himself to hold fast to the sparks for his daughters but he didn’t know if he could. He wasn’t sure that such little sparks could survive in all that dark. Finally, he looked up and pushed the key forward and the Cummins shook itself to life. He put the truck into gear and rolled up the dirt road away from the little house, the light from his daughters’ room spilling amber into the blue morning.

On the side of the road a mile or so up from his house there was a rattlesnake swallowing one of the gray desert rats that run across the roads at night. Its mouth gaped, its jaws unhinging grotesquely, and the white diamonds of scales shimmered serpentine down its back. He thought of swerving to kill it but he didn’t, he just passed on.

 

When he got to the ranch house he parked out front, leaving the engine idling, and walked around to the back. He knocked on the cracked wood of the screen door before letting himself in. Mr. Raburn looked up from his paper and set down his coffee.

“Mornin’, Mr. Raburn.”

“Mornin’, Larry.”

“What needs gettin’ done today?”

“Well, that storm last night knocked down some fencin’ over in the Madrugada.”

“Alright, I’ll get that back up. Any of the cattle run?”

“No, no. I called up Jorge and Luis after the rain slowed and they drove the cattle into Oscuridad before the flash was over.”

He took a sip from his coffee. “You want a cup?”

“Sure, I’ll take some coffee,” Larry said sitting down. “You want those cattle back in the Madrugada when I finish with the fence?”

“I’ll get Jorge and Luis to do that again. When you’re done come on back up here, the loader’s got a leak in the hydraulics that needs fixin’ and after that I ordered some steel to replace the windmill, I might have you pull the gooseneck into town to go pick it up. We’ll work on that for the next few days. I figure we’ll oil up the old Aermotor gearbox.”

He took a sip from his coffee and read absently from the paper, a corner of it lifted in his hand off the table.

“Did you know we’ve had that gearbox and the blades since back when my daddy ran this place?”

“No, sir, I didn’t know that.”

“Well, it’s true. Anyways, we’ll use that and the blades again but we’ll build a steel base where the wood is now. I’ll get you to weld the base.”

“Yessir.”

He had gotten up and was about to walk out when he turned back.

“Mr. Raburn.”

“Yeah, Larry, what you got?”

“Sarah Beth left this mornin’.”

“When’s she comin’ back?”

“I don’t know if she is, sir.”

Mr. Raburn had picked up his paper but he put it back down and he looked at Larry for a little while pursing his lips.

“I’m sorry ’bout that, Larry, I really am,” he said finally. “You take the time you need.”

“Well, I thank you. I’ll get to that fencin’.”

 

The morning clouded as he worked and he ran the barbed wire rusty through his hands in the gray light.

“We’ve broken it all,” he said to no one. We broke every last bit, he thought sitting down on the ground among the tall white blooms of the Lechugia.

 

He moved slowly up the line at school, the big white Dodge idling low and throaty, the gooseneck behind it. When Abby saw his truck she walked over to him carrying her lunch pail in her hand and her pink backpack that they had gotten for her before school began and the dry desert wind tossed about her light hair. She had a piece of manila paper in her other hand and after he had reached across the bench seat and opened the door for her she climbed up into the truck and gave him the piece of paper.

“What’ve you got, Abigail?”

“I made it for you,” she said smiling mischievously.

He looked at it as she pulled the seatbelt over her little body. It was a picture of him on a horse with her in front of him and hills behind them and his heart tightened as he looked at it and he didn’t know why.

“The horse’s name is Parnell,” she said.

It was a gray horse with dark spots.

“Where’d you think of a name like that?”

“I don’t know,” she said shrugging. “I just did.”

“I like it. It’s a good name.” His voice was shaking and he cleared his throat, and breathed in deep to steady himself.

They pulled out of the parking lot onto Sul Ross and drove towards the middle school to pick up Isabelle.

“Scoot on over so Izzy can get in.”

“She can sit in back.”

“The back’s dirty, sweetie. Plus, I want you to come over here and sit by me,” he said teasingly.

She giggled and moved over to sit in the middle of the bench. They pulled in and picked up Isabelle and he was quiet driving towards Morrison’s.

“Where are we going, Dad?”

“We’re goin’ to Morrison’s, Izz. I gotta pick some steel up for Mr. Raburn. I think we’re gonna be building a new windmill where the old one used to sit.”

“Is everything okay? Mom was crying when she dropped me off at school today and she wouldn’t say why.”

He couldn’t look at her and he thought he was going to cry but he didn’t.

“Mom left, sweetie.”

He said it quiet and he wasn’t sure the girls had heard but they had.

“Where’d she go?” Isabelle asked.

“I don’t know. She said she was goin’ to the city but she wouldn’t say where.”

“When’s she coming home?” She was starting to cry.

“I don’t know, sweetie. I don’t know that she is.”

Isabelle was crying and Abigail didn’t understand what had happened but he pulled them close to him on the bench seat and he held them against his rough work shirt and told them not to be afraid.

“We’re gonna do alright in this one, okay, girls? We’re gonna do okay.”

 

That night he cooked fajitas that he had made out of flank steak bought at the supermarket before he picked the girls up at school. He grilled them outside on the barrel grill over charcoal and he grilled peppers and onions wrapped in aluminum foil and tortillas. The coals glowed through the tortillas in the dusky air. When he served the tacos to the girls it was with green onions and cilantro and a salsa he made himself. Before cooking the fajitas he had mixed dough, flour and shortening and butter and a touch of sugar and salt, and he rolled the dough in his heavy hands and put it into the refrigerator. He melted butter and mixed in brown sugar and cinnamon and he poured it over green apple slices and rolled out the dough and cut it deftly into a circle and placed it in an old clay-fired pie dish. He put the apples in and crisscrossed it with dough and sprinkled some of the butter and brown sugar over the crust and he put it all in the oven. He thought that the girls would be happier if they had something nice to eat and they were a little bit, but the night was dark all the same.

After they had eaten he put the dishes in the sink and he took the girls back to their bedroom and made Abigail take a shower and they both brushed their teeth and he pulled the curtains closed and tucked them in. When they were in their sheets he told them stories about when he rode in the rodeos, about the broncos and the bulls, fierce eyed and wild with madness. He told them about when he rode the famous Red Rock, how he had held for seven seconds, almost eight, but lost in the last bit. How the bull glistened under the auditorium lights as he stomped great holes straight to the heavy core of the earth. He told them about hunting in the Del Carmen with his father when he was a child. How they had come upon a black bear in the forest and how the thing reared up on its haunches bellowing down at them. He said that he almost shot the bear but that his dad put his hand on the gun and told him to wait. His dad had said if the bear charged that they would shoot but until then that they could let it live. He said that the bear finally took its head from out of the sky and that it glided gloriously dark back into the pines. While he spoke Isabelle was quiet and Abigail played with the shapes of the shadows of her hands in the lamplight.

After his stories were told he kissed them both on their heads and he turned the lamp off and walked out of their room.

 

He went outside and drank half a bottle of cheap whiskey, letting the brown liquid burn his throat and flutter his eyelids. The charred oak taste of it and the alcohol fumes floating into his lungs when he breathed. He stood out there on the plains looking up at the stars. God, the great welder. His torch spattering the sky with the blazing bodies of the heavens illumined. He wondered at the strangeness that man should be the metal that the Lord chose to be his craft. How the divine torch must never stop working and repairing what the world does to people. How the heat of His gun is set to the limit of what men might bear and must be so and that that limit is a thing far beyond where most men believe it could be. He thought maybe the Lord needed to learn to work faster, though, that too many spirits became unbonded to the bodies they were meant to inhabit. End up with too much cold metal and not enough fire. A train’s whistle blew far distant and the darkness parted for the sound of it and then closed again as it passed. He went inside and stripped off his pants and his shirt and he got into his bed. Sarah Beth’s ring was on her bedside table with her pearl earrings and there was a note that said to give the ring to Isabelle and the earrings to Abby. He slept though he didn’t think he could.

 

He got up the next morning and he took the cereal out of the pantry and the milk from the refrigerator and he woke the girls and they both had forgotten for a moment what had passed.

“Was it a dream?” Isabelle asked.

“No, sweetie, it was no dream. We’re gonna be alright, we’re just gonna have to take it a day at a time, okay? It’ll be hard for a while, that’s just the way it works, alright?”

 

He was all that morning looking at the plans for the windmill and thinking about how to set up the trelliswork for welding, the best angles to use. He welded a seven-by-seven-foot steel square that would be moored to two piles driven into the ground around the well. Mr. Raburn walked into the barn where Larry was welding, the sparks of metal bouncing off his canvas shirt and falling about his boots below.

“Larry, you doin’ alright?”

Larry stopped welding and pulled his hood up over his face. He was sweating and his eyes were red.

“I’m doin’ alright, sir. Could be better, I guess.”

They stood for a while, quiet, Mr. Raburn looking over the base.

“When Sadie died a few years back, I couldn’t think straight for weeks. Even just the simple day-to-day things, I couldn’t do them right. And I know what you’ve got is different, as leavin’ while you’re still alive is a thing of choice, where death, well, there ain’t much choice in that, is there?”

“No, sir, I imagine there isn’t.”

Larry picked the corner of the base up and pushed on it, absently testing the strength of the weld.

“Mr. Raburn, I’m gonna be alright, I think. I’m pretty sure I will at least, but I worry about my girls, Mr. Raburn. I don’t want them to start hatin’ people too young. There’s time enough in the future for that. I don’t want them to get it when they’re just girls.”

“Larry, if you need time, I can give it to you.”

Larry was quiet for a while.

“I’ll be alright. Thank you, though.”

 

That evening Isabelle came to him embarrassed.

“What’s wrong, Izz?”

“Dad, I’m bleeding.”

“Where, sweetie?”

“My privates,” she said turning her face from him. “My stomach hurts.”

“Oh, God,” he said, “it’s okay. You’re having your first period. Shit, I wish your mom were here right now.”

He realized as he said it that he shouldn’t have and she was crying. He held her shaking to him.

“I’m sorry, Isabelle. I shouldn’t of said that. Listen, sweetie, wait in the bathroom. I’ll go into town and get you what you need. You’ll be okay, this is just part of growin’ up. Get some Advil for your stomach, I think you’re havin’ cramps. It’ll make it hurt less.”

She said okay into his shirt, but he could hear that she was afraid.

He went and told Abigail that she needed to sit with her sister and talk to her, that he would be back in just a bit.

“What’s wrong, Daddy?”

“It’s alright, your sister’s just feeling a little sick. Listen, I’ll be back in just a bit. Sit outside the door and talk to your sister, alright?”

“Okay.”

 

When he got to the store he walked to the counter a little bit embarrassed and he asked one of the women clerks what he should buy if his daughter was having her first period. The woman told him that he should get sanitary napkins and a heating pad.

“We already have a heating pad, but thank you,” he said, and he went on and bought a box of sanitary napkins.

He left the Dollar General and headed towards the Flying J.

 

The diner was quiet and he walked towards the row of silver swivel benches in front of the bar. She was sitting behind the counter with her legs crossed and Larry thought to himself that she had always been something prettier than what you’d expect to find where you found her.

“Blueeyes.”

She turned a little bit surprised.

“Bobcat,” she said, “it’s been a real long time.”

She walked around the counter and hugged him.

“Yeah, I’m sorry about that.”

“It’s okay. It’s nothin’ I wasn’t expectin’.”

“Listen, Sarah Beth left me a few days ago.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay. It’s just, Izzy’s havin’ her first period and I need someone to talk to her. I don’t mean to put you to anything, I just don’t have anyone else to go to. Raburn’s wife’s been dead for years and I ain’t talked to many women enough since I married Sarah Beth.”

“Listen, sweetie, I understand. I haven’t forgot you neither.”

He smiled for the first time in a while.

“I appreciate it, I really do. I’m sorry it’s been so long. You look like you’re doin’ well.”

“I am. I’m doin’ alright.”

They left the store and drove towards the ranch and the desert stretched far about them and the stars pressed down against them.

 

When they got to the house he gave Blueeyes what he had bought at the store and he showed her to the bathroom and told Isabelle that there was an old friend of his who would help her. He heard the toilet flush and they waited for a little while and then the door opened and Isabelle let Blueeyes in and Isabelle looked up embarrassed.

He took Abigail and they walked to the porch and waited.

“Is Izzy going to be alright?” Abigail asked him.

“She’s goin’ to be fine.”

“Who’s that lady?”

“She’s a friend of mine from when I was younger.”

“She seems nice.”

“She is, sweetie. She’s a good lady.”

 

When Blueeyes came out, she and Isabelle were talking and Isabelle was thanking her and Blueeyes told her that it wasn’t anything. Blueeyes got into Larry’s truck and he asked her where she wanted him to take her.

“I still live over on Means.”

“Alright, I’ll take you there.”

They drove in silence for a while, cottontails tearing like shooting stars through the high beams.

“Listen, Blueeyes, I really appreciate this more than maybe I can tell you.”

“I know, sweetie. It’s okay.”

They were quiet for some time.

“When’d she leave you?”

“Three days ago. I cooked her breakfast, and she took the girls to school. Then she left.”

“Why’d she leave?”

“I don’t know. She changed, I guess. People change. Mostly it seems in ways that are hard. It says in the Bible, ‘Like iron sharpens iron, so a man sharpens another.’ I wonder sometimes at whoever wrote that down, if maybe they spent all their time around priests or in churches. It’s been my experience the other way around.”

“I’ve seen what you’re sayin’, sweetie.”

“Yeah, well, you ever see anything else, you let me know. That’ll be the place where I’m headin’.”

“I’ve seen somethin’ else. People can be good to each other, Larry, for a little while at least. Maybe not much more than a little while though. I saw it in your girls tonight. You’re not a bad father, Larry. Those girls love you.”

He was quiet and when they got to her house and she opened the door to leave and the light came on in the truck there were tears falling down his face.

 

When he got home he walked in to make sure the girls were alright, and they were both asleep. He pulled their covers up about them and kissed them on their heads and walked into his room.

 

In his dream the night came dark and bare down the hillside, constellations upon constellations dripping from her naked skin and her eyes blue where he thought they’d be brown. The stars running off of her pooled molten in the troughs of the hills and shined upwards into the sudden blackness without.

She walked to him almost shyly saying, “I’ve seen you looking at me.”

“Yes,” he said, “almost every night.”

“Why don’t you ever talk to me?”

“I didn’t know I could,” he said, “or that you’d want me to if I knew how.”

“I do,” she whispered silvery onto his cheek and through his hair. “I do.”

When she spoke her words were warmer than he would’ve imagined them to be, and when she kissed him it was with the gray gentleness of owls’ feathers delicately touching the dark.

“I don’t know what I’m doing right now,” he said. “I got two girls and me and I don’t know what to do.”

He woke near tears with longing for the dream to be real but it was not and he felt that he was more alone in that moment than he had ever been, the stars softly glowing between his sheets.

 

The next morning he woke up and cooked the girls French toast and the agave was blooming outside the house, the white of the blossoms astral in the dawn light, and hummingbirds and bees orbited about it like tiny planets filling with nectar.

“I don’t want to go to school today.”

“Izzy, you’ve only got a day more and it’s summer, and I’ve a treat for us.”

“Tell me what’s the treat and I’ll maybe go to school,” she said smiling.

“I think we’re gonna go to the beach.”

 

He talked to Mr. Raburn that morning about taking a few days off and Mr. Raburn said it would be okay so long as the windmill was finished. Larry stayed and worked hard in the hot summer sun. He worked the bright blue gun and his bronzed skin glistened about his neck from the heat and he reckoned that he drank a whole cooler of water the day he set up the windmill. Luis worked the loader to hold the steel up and Jorge and Larry made sure the angles were correct. The wire feed sounded a Morse code too fast to comprehend and the windmill stood up and the gearbox was set into place and unlocked and the sucker rod began pumping down and back deep into the ground and the concrete cistern filled again with water.

 

The next day they pulled onto the road, the turbo whine rising ghostly into the morning dark. Isabelle had asked if Blueeyes could come and Larry said he would think about it. He called her later that night and invited her. He told her that it was for the girls and that she needn’t consider him, though he would be happy to have her too.

“I’d love to, Larry, I really would,” she had said.

They listened to AM country stations and they all sang along and for a while they kept the windows down, everyone’s hair strangely alive in the little pool of wind inside the truck. Beside them the clouds drug their heavy shadows over the dry ground.

 

He had called ahead and rented a condo in Port Aransas and they spent the day on the beach and grilled hot dogs for lunch, the summer taste of ketchup and mustard filling their mouths. Larry sat with Blueeyes in his bathing suit and his cowboy hat, and the girls played in the surf, jumping the waves and throwing their hands over their heads and falling into the foam. The waves rolled all up and down the beach and the sky held no clouds at all.

“What’ve you been doin’ these years?” Larry asked.

“For a while, it was what I was doin’ when I knew you. I mostly stopped that. I saved money durin’ the last few years, as funny as it might sound. Lately, I’ve been workin’ the counter and such. Bob and his wife have been pretty good to me.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” he said.

She looked down at a cockle shell that she was running her fingers over and her hair fell darkly about in the wind.

“Every so often I see one of the old-timers, but there’s not fun in it anymore. I don’t think really that there ever was. For a little bit there was at least the idea of it. I don’t know. Lately, I can’t think on the past with much fondness.”

“Everybody’s got what they aren’t proud of.”

She looked off over the beach and watched the girls. The gulls cawed crassly in the blue sky.

“Some have more of it than others,” she said looking up at the birds. “I’ve been gettin’ better at not blamin’ myself for things I’ve done. A little better at not blamin’ everybody else, but that’s been maybe harder. Maybe not. You only get one go of this thing. It’s not like you get to start into it knowin’ how to do it. You just kinda feel your way along.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re probably right.”

She looked off at the horizon over the sea, the flatness of it almost unbearable where the sky touched down onto the waters.

“I’d see those other girls and they’d get to dyin’, mostly just in their eyes but some of them actually. I tried not to let it touch me, but sometimes watchin’ death creep in on the eyes of those other girls got me shook up pretty good. I walked in one day to Loreen lyin’ naked and pale in her rosy bath water. She’d cut her wrists.”

She picked up the speckled shell and threw it down towards the sea.

“I can’t say I’ve been shown much to recommend life to me, but I’ve taken a likin’ to it all the same,” she said, standing up from where they were sitting, brushing the sand off her legs.

“Larry, thanks for inviting me out here. I’ve been needin’ to get away for a while.”

“Yeah, you’re welcome. I’m glad you came.”

The girls were walking up from the water.

“Blueeyes, I’m sorry if any of the things you look back on that hurt were things I had part in.”

“Listen, Bobcat, I always loved you.”

They laughed.

“No, you weren’t ever bad to me. I waited for you to come back for a long time, but I guess I wasn’t that surprised when you didn’t,” she said.

 

That night Larry lit a lantern and parceled a section of beach out of the darkness and there was the smell of kerosene burning. The girls ran about in the paraffin light catching the little sand-colored ghost crabs, diving around on the sand laughing and yelling.

“Daddy, I got one,” Abigail yelled, running up to him, holding a yellow plastic bucket up to the lantern, her hair all adrift in the shore wind.

“Yeah, sweetie. It’s a pretty lookin’ one.”

 

After he put the girls to bed, their sheets hot against their sunburned skin, he walked out onto the beach by himself. The sand was wet against his bare feet and the onshore wind blew warm off the sea. He stood beneath the heavens burning, the stars pulsing like coals in the wind. He stood there for a long time and he loved his girls such that his heart ached and he prayed that they would stay unbroken, but he was afraid because he knew that the world breaks everything. That almost none escape its iron embrace, clutching and pressing the souls of men into the shape of a thing not touched by God for a very long time. He knew also, though, that some survive and so he prayed that his daughters would grow strong enough that they could keep themselves away from some of the night. After he had stood a long time on the beach he turned and walked back into the condo.

 

When he went inside, he found Abigail in his bed and she was sobbing.

“Sweetie, what’s wrong?”

She was half-asleep.

“I don’t want you to leave us. I don’t want you to leave.”

He couldn’t say anything for a long time. He just held her, his jaws clenched, and when he spoke he was crying.

“I’m not goin’ to leave you, I promise. And I won’t promise you what I can’t keep.”

She quieted and he held her until she stilled and he fell asleep with her pulled against his chest all nested in the covers and the dark.

 

Outside the stars caught in the mesquite branches and on the thorns, and everything went swinging on round the pole star, grinding the nocturnal mills.

Offshore in the deeps of the sea, sardines swirled in great silver shoals upward between the serried rays of moonlight, and two marlins cut through the schools, their great swords thrashing back and forth, flashing bright in that marine dark, flashing like meteors through the black water.

THE BEST DAMN FLAGGER IN AUDRAIN COUNTY

“Look’s like Zach’s working late,” Jane said, pointing in the direction of Bill Keating’s soy fields with one hand, the other hand on the wheel. “Maybe he’s got more work than he can handle by himself.” It was a baited comment, but I looked anyway, watched my brother’s Air Tractor running back-and-forths in the sky over the fields. I hadn’t worked in weeks.

“I heard something about Zach running around with Laura Keating,” I said. “He’s probably trying to get in good with her dad.”

“It’s not like your brother to work late, even for a woman. Makes me wonder why he doesn’t need your help.” The words slid from the side of Jane’s mouth as she let the wheel play back and forth in her palm. “If he can afford a new GPS and has enough business to work ’til sundown, seems he could use an extra hand.” I held our three-month-old son on my lap, lifted him as Jane plowed through a pothole. He squealed with ignorant delight as my hands tossed him in the air and my head banged against the back window of the pickup. Jane choked down a laugh. When I wasn’t working, she took extra pleasure in raking me over the coals. I reached over with my free hand and turned on the fizz of AM radio, searching for snippets of the Cardinals game as we bounced our way home.

When Jane and I married a few years back, her father set us up in this townhouse in downtown Mount Poplar, or what passes for downtown in a place like Mount Poplar. He also dressed me in a sales position at his dealership—“Bennett Chevrolet, family owned since 1982.” Despite its name, Mount Poplar is like the rest of southeast Missouri: flat. Living in town meant we didn’t farm for a living and were therefore of a certain class. But I couldn’t stand downtown. Whenever Jane went on one of her tirades, I longed for an endless expanse of green to swallow her words. Fortunately, the IRS audited Jane’s father two years into our marriage. The townhouse and my job were the first extravagances to go.

Since then we’ve been living in this run-down house on my dad’s farm. We conceived our son on the same patch of land where I was born and not much Jane says gets to me anymore. She stopped talking to her father when the money ran out, but I drive by the dealership every once in a while to check in. Last time I caught him fiddling with the engine of a client’s trade-in, his tie tucked into his dress shirt, his blazer hung on the raised hood. Jane’s dad started as a mechanic way back and it pained me to see him back where he began. My father’s farm loses about twenty grand a year but government handouts put him in the black. He grows corn and soy. When tobacco was king in the eighties, he stupidly tried to plant it. Within a few years the soil was sterile and the tobacco never flourished.

After Jane and me moved into the farmhouse, she spent most her days in bed watching soap operas and crying about our fall from grace. Dad gave us the house for free but he turned down my offer to help on the farm. “I got Mexicans that work for almost nothing,” he said. “Why would I hire you?”

I spent my ample free time fixing up the house, occasionally taking drywall jobs in town or helping Zach with his business, Zach’s Aerial Application. He fixed up an old ag plane he bought as junk and came up with a motto: “We’ve got your crops covered, from Z to A.” I think it was during the first few months after I returned to the farm, the months Jane had lost the energy to give me a hard time, that I was happiest. We were just making ends meet and life seemed manageable.

After the house began to take a more respectable shape—a secure banister, new carpet, a dry basement—Jane came out of her depression and life changed again. Rather than letting me pick and choose projects as I saw fit, half-completing them until something better came along, Jane made a list of my “chores” and clipped it to the refrigerator. She tied a bandanna around her head and tromped around the house with two water buckets—one dirty, one clean—and talked each night about the amount of work she’d done making our home “acceptable.” She took whatever money I made and shopped for furniture at flea markets, replacing the family relics with things more suited to her taste. Sometimes she dragged the heirloom furniture, pieces that had been my mother’s mother’s, into the dank basement, where it was forgotten.

As Jane’s presence in the house grew, mine shrunk. It was around this time that Jane became pregnant. During the first trimester, before the morning sickness and added weight, our relationship improved. We snuggled and talked about baby names and made plans, but as her stomach grew, Jane became distant and cold. I think she was in a pain I never really understood.

 

About an hour after we survived Jane’s drive home, the phone rang and I watched Jane set our son in the center of the kitchen table where we take our meals. His legs kicked as if he were some sort of shelled ocean creature stuck on its back and trying to grab the sand.

Jane twirled the phone’s cord in her free hand. “Saw you flying pretty late today,” she said into the receiver and raised herself on the balls of her feet, stretching. “He’s on the couch, but I think he’s free tomorrow.” She made no effort to get my attention. “I already put him to bed,” she lied. I looked at our son, thrashing less wildly now, accustomed to a hard surface and the inability to right himself. I wished he would start screaming and expose Jane’s lie. “Let me get your brother,” she said and motioned me toward the phone. As I grabbed it, she kissed me pertly on the cheek. I never understand her in moments like these. She took our son into the TV room and closed the door.

Zach asked me to work the next day, said he had a bookkeeping backlog because he’d been too busy flying and sleeping with Laura Keating. I indulged him by asking about the relationship. He told me about the all-the-time sex and her father’s money.

“Bill’s getting something out of you too, I suppose,” I said.

“Application at cost. Or close to.”

“So you get the girl and he gets the fertilizer.”

“That’s right, man. I barter like a Chinese trader.” I heard a girlish laugh in the background. “So I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow,” I said and hung up.

Jane poked her head through the door and stared, her own endearing way of asking if I was working the next day.

“You’ll need to watch him tomorrow,” I said and she nodded. She popped open a Mich Ultra and took a long drink.

“Zach asked if we are going to the barbecue tomorrow,” she said. “His band’s playing.”

“I guess we should.” Jane sucked her teeth. I wondered where she had placed our son. She treated him like a set of keys, like some object she didn’t mind losing, figuring it would turn up again eventually. I opened the refrigerator and pretended to search for leftovers until I heard her shut the kitchen door.

 

When he first bought and repaired the ag plane, Zach talked about the two of us starting a business together. I didn’t have any money to invest but took flight classes even though I had no talent for it. I was nervous on the short takeoffs, felt sick to my stomach making the low-flying turns of a crop duster, and had trouble maintaining a steady line when buzzing fields. The kicker was the licensing test. For part of the test, a pilot takes you up in a puddle jumper while you’re hooded. He flies a good distance from the landing strip, constantly changing course, and places the plane at an awkward heading. About fifteen minutes in, the pilot sets the plane on cruise, switches seats, and asks you to right the plane using only the instruments. Vertigo always set in as I tried to sense the plane’s course. The difficulty isn’t reading the instruments; it’s more about trusting them. You can right the wings, nose, and rudder, get to the proper altitude and heading, and still swear the plane is listing, flying sideways through the air. I failed the test twice before passing. I tended to make slight adjustments based on my senses and when the hood was removed, I would realize we were flying crooked—the nose raised, the wings angled.

That final time I took the test, I cried in the cockpit as the instruments told me one thing and my brain another. The instrument panel blurred from the tears that I tried to wipe away without the test pilot noticing, but I stuck to the instruments and passed. Jane wanted to celebrate when I came home with a license, but I went straight to bed and told her we would go out another night. She tried to wake me with a midnight blow job but I pushed her away. The next night, after I took her for a steak dinner, she slept stiff as a board.

“Anyone can learn to fly,” Zach told me afterwards. “But the best pilots, they have natural ability.”

“So I won’t be flying your prop?” I asked.

“Only one plane anyway,” Zach replied. “I’ll always need somebody flagging in the field, though.” From then on I was dropped as a business partner and became a hired hand. I took Zach up on his offer and helped him as a flagger and bookkeeper.

I never told Jane about my failures as a pilot, and I’ve never taken her up in a plane like I promised, never even flown since I got the license. Back then Jane still believed I could provide her a good life and I didn’t want to disappoint her.

 

Zach picked me up at seven in the morning, his socks and boots sitting between us as he worked the clutch and gas with his bare feet. “This girl, I tell you what—” he said and took a deep breath. I waited for him to finish but he just rolled down his window and spit. I fumbled with the stereo until he reached over and turned it off. “I woke up with her on top of me,” he said and gave a sort of tribal whoop. “All ready to go, her father asleep downstairs. Man, she sweats.” He shimmied with excitement from the memory.

“Her father hear you?” I asked.

“She says he sleeps without his hearing aids.” I imagined old man Keating waking up one random night, reaching out to the bedside table for his hearing aids, only to hear the moans of his daughter. I wondered if he would jump to his feet, grab a shotgun, and confront Zach, or if he would just sit in bed, mesmerized by Laura’s animal sounds, the rhythmic scratching of headboard against wall. I imagined myself with Laura Keating, lifting her into the corner, her legs wrapped across my hips like a broad belt, her arms pressed against the walls for support.

I looked over at Zach and wondered if he could read my mind, but he had his head arched toward the window, opening his mouth wide and taking in big gasps of air before letting them go. “If the wind holds off, I think I’ll have you flag this afternoon,” he said. “You know, for old times’ sake.”

“I didn’t bring a mask. Why not just use the GPS?”

“I have some masks at the office.”

To call Zach’s trailer an office is a bit misleading. Most of the ag pilots keep their planes at the same landing strip, about thirty minutes outside Mount Poplar. On one side of the runway about twenty square trailers with attached garages stand evenly spaced. The pilots leave their planes out when they’re working, as if the planes were Old West ponies tied to hitching posts. Zach still hasn’t built steps to his trailer, so there is a two-foot drop to the ground, and inside everything from the carpet to the blocky desk and shelves is a sort of stain-swallowing brown. A phone and answering machine with a blinking red light perch on the corner of a desk littered with crumpled papers and cups of tobacco spit.

I pulled an old typewriter from the desk drawer and heaved it onto the desk. “I’m gonna check on the plane,” Zach said and I asked him to flip on the lights before he left. The fluorescent overheads buzzed and flickered, brightening and darkening the room without any particular rhythm. I organized the papers on the desk into two piles—clients and suppliers—and put anything marked urgent or overdue on top. Then I checked the phone messages, new and old, and made detailed notes before deleting them.

Zach came back, started the coffeemaker, and laid down on this tan love seat he’d picked up on the side of the road, letting his legs fall over the edge. He kicked the side with the heels of his boots. I wondered what it meant about me that Zach, with his mounting debt and cavalier business habits, was considered the family success.

“So, what’s the damage there, cowboy?” he said in a rather poor Texas drawl, giving a lazy sweep of his hand toward the desk.

“You need to call Schneider Chemical. They left two messages saying you’ve used all your credit.”

Zach reached into his jeans pocket, pulled out a rubber-banded roll of cash. “Let’s pay him in person,” he said and jumped up from the couch, his cowboy hat falling from his head. “Like the good ole days.” The morning sun had plastered Zach’s yellow hair to his forehead and exposed a receding hairline. I realized for the first time how meticulously he combed it when he went hatless. I took off my own farmer’s cap, revealing a healthy bald spot and broad forehead, giving Zach a view of the future.

“You rob a 7-Eleven?” I asked.

“Just got paid for a job,” he said, waving the bills. “Tax free.”

Business went on like this: calls about missed payments, lies about checks lost in the mail, promises for new ones to be sent. Zach made the phone calls, and I watched him pace the carpet, gesturing wildly with his left hand, which held the base of the phone. Sometimes he settled the receiver between his ear and shoulder so he could use both hands to make a point. And when the person on the other end talked at any length, he rolled his eyes and wound himself like a mummy in the phone cord. In the end he charmed his way out of every problem. He always knew the right excuse to use: how busy he was and how that meant he’d be a great client in the future, how he liked to fly but wasn’t much for paperwork, how he didn’t even know anything had been the matter until I went through the paperwork, or how he had fallen for this hot little piece and how his mind couldn’t focus with that apple-bottom ass running around in his head all day.

I tired of Zach’s voice, grabbed a cup of coffee, and walked outside. A pilot from three garages down rolled by in a refurbished biplane without any tanks attached, just a hobbyhorse flyer. He gave a quick wave as he adjusted himself in the seat and set his helmet and glasses. At the end of the runway he made a loop turn, straightened the plane, and accelerated. Even as he gained speed, the plane seemed to pass in slow motion. I could make out the details of its structure, the stabilizer bars of the wings, the thin wheels and rusted body with aluminum patches welded to the tail. I felt like I’d been transported to 1918, that this was a man off to fight the Germans. Three-quarters down the runway he began to take the air, a slight wobble as he lifted the nose, and ten seconds later just a fleck in the sky.

I made my way over to Zach’s Air Tractor. It was bright yellow with red accent paint, the leather pilot’s seat polished, the windshield spotless. Zach had only so much care to give the world and so he’d always looked out for two things first and foremost: himself and his plane. I picked up a couple pebbles from the ground and tossed them into the spotless cockpit.

For the rest of the morning, Zach dictated invoices, estimating materials and hours haphazardly as I typed them on the typewriter. The keys kept sticking and I had to make corrections in pen. Zach would look at each invoice, point to the typos, and say, “Fifty cents,” as if he were docking my pay.

When we finished I called Jane. The phone rang six times before she picked up and said, “Yes?”

“Is that the way you answer the phone now?” I asked.

“I’m making lunch,” she said. “And I feel like I have changed a thousand fucking diapers already.”

“He is a baby,” I said. Zach dropped to his knees and pretended to weep.

“Wow,” Jane exclaimed. “Here I’ve been spending all day in this house wondering why I married you and I just got it. He’s a baby! Genius.”

“You can leave the house,” I said. “You have the truck.”

“Make sure Zach pays you today,” Jane said and hung up.

“Can’t win with that one,” Zach said. “Jane’s like a green pony, man. You just gotta keep getting up there until she gives up and stops bucking. Might never happen, though.”

“That’s real wise, Zach,” I said. “You should be a marriage counselor.”

“If there’s one thing I know,” he said as he leaned over, placed one hand on the arm of the couch, and began to move his hips back and forth, “it’s how to break down a green pony.” His hips quickened and his free hand grabbed his cowboy hat and flailed it as he humped the furniture. I wondered if he was imagining Laura Keating or my own wife beneath him. “Let’s go,” he said immediately after letting out the dramatic moan of a climax. “We gotta quit dickin’ around and get to work.”

 

I drove Zach’s truck east on Highway 60 toward a couple cornfields he had to treat with Atrazine. It felt good to be driving. Ever since we had the baby, Jane made me ride passenger-side. I found Zach’s Skoal in the glove box and an empty can beneath the seat. I rolled the windows down and enjoyed the tobacco buzz. On a good Missouri day, you can place one finger on the wheel and drive straight for miles, never catching up to a slow-moving tractor, never dodging a deer loping across the road.

By the time I reached the farm, I heard Zach’s plane in the sky behind me. He swooped down toward the truck, turned the plane sideways about twenty feet off the ground, and gave me a big, childlike grin. I put on a mask and an extra flannel shirt I’d found in the office, lugged the orange flags to the cornfield. When I waved one in the air, Zach stopped circling and turned the plane on course, coming down over the field. I set the flag in the ground and moved down the row with the rest of the flags.

Zach steadied the plane about ten feet over the corn and opened his tanks, the stalks swaying slightly under his pass. There’s a beauty to the danger of a plane so near the ground, the lack of room for error. As I watched Zach fly, a familiar pang of jealousy welled up in my stomach. I longed to have his view from the sky. Instead I covered my mouth and crouched down, eyes closed, as he passed overhead, the splatter of herbicide against my clothes, the chemical smell dappling the air. I checked the application and waved a flag to let Zach know the cover was good. Then I found the edge of his spray, took five large strides, and waved the second flag. Zach looped the plane like a rolling pigeon and rather than spraying back and forth, the way a man mows his lawn, he returned on the same axis, spraying only as he headed west.

We finished both fields in an hour, and Zach buzzed me one last time as I collected the flags. I drove back with the windows down to air out my chemical-covered clothes. By the time I got to the office, Zach had closed up shop. “Scoot over and keep the motor running,” he said and hopped in driver-side. He tossed me a white envelope with a rubber band. It was filled with twenties, almost a thousand dollars’ worth, and I couldn’t help but imagine the smile on Jane’s face when she fingered the bills.

“Why so much?” I asked.

“I probably owed you some back pay,” he said and I raised my eyebrows. “Don’t let those unpaid bills fool you,” he said. “I’m rich. Also, just so everything’s on the table, my GPS is busted. I need you to flag until I can get that bastard that ripped me off to fix it.”

“So flagging wasn’t just a trip down memory lane?”

“Hell it wasn’t,” Zach said. “Didn’t it feel like old times? Didn’t you have fun?” I didn’t answer him, but it was true. I smacked the envelope against my thigh, said thanks. “No need for thanks,” he said. “You’re gonna buy me a couple rounds before the barbecue.” Then he sniffed the air. “You smell like fucking herbicide.”

We stopped by Clemens’ Bar and some of the drunken, retired farmers walked by and smelled my shirt. “Ain’t no weeds gonna grow on you, Youngblood,” one laughed, exhaling stale beer and cigarette smoke.

Zach told them I was the best damn flagger in Audrain County and they nodded and turned serious. “Had a friend who flagged,” one said, patting me on the shoulder. “Got cancer. They was spraying real mean stuff. Doctors blamed it on the cigarettes, but he didn’t smoke except when he was drunk.”

“Sorry to hear that,” I said.

“It don’t matter,” he said. “He was gonna die sometime. I’m just saying. I hope things changed since then.”

“It’s just part-time work,” I said and took a drink. I bought the man a round but we ran out of things to say and turned our attention to the Cardinals game. The new stadium was filled and some kid named Reyes was on the mound. The old men traded Mexican jokes, said, “He’s diggin’ into the mound like he was born for it,” said, “It’s so hot in St. Louis today, a man can’t help but get a wet back.” Reyes threw shutout inning after shutout inning. Zach tapped my arm in the bottom of the seventh and we stood to leave. “Kid can pitch,” he said as La Russa decided to pinch-hit for Reyes.

 

Zach dropped me off and Jane was out of the house yelling about something before I even had a chance to say goodbye. The sun was just beginning to set, a long summer sun, and I stared at it and let Jane’s words pass me by.

“Awww, shove it, Jane!” Zach yelled, and even though she scowled at him, it turned into a smile. Zach revved the engine and backed out of the drive, his arm out the window, middle finger exposed to the sky.

Jane tramped through the dry grass without shoes, her sundress flapping about her knees, her splotched legs pumping in and out of view. “You gotta clean the boy up ’cause I need to shower and get ready,” she said, walking straight up to me. “You smell like chemical,” she added. “Wash your hands before you touch him.” She turned and plodded back the way she’d come.

I washed my hands at the kitchen sink and changed our son’s diaper. Then I soaped my hair and underarms and stripped down to my underwear, trying to make as little mess as possible while Jane showered. I picked up my chemical-soaked clothes in one hand and perched the baby on my hip with the other, letting his soft skin meet mine, his little hand perched just below my chest in a clump of black hair as we walked to the bedroom to change.

Jane came out of our bathroom a throwback to the stunning girl I’d married. She still fit into her slim Wranglers, which molded to the curve of her hips. And she wore a flower-printed cowgirl shirt tucked in tight so that her chest pushed the fabric away from her body. I knew it was more the work of the bra than her breasts, which had given way to gravity, but none of that mattered. She was beautiful. She let her hair down for the first time in as long as I could remember, a straight cascade running to the middle of her back, and gave herself bangs, which covered her tight, tanned forehead and softened her face.

I imagine that moments like these are when a husband falls back in love with his wife, when he grabs her passionately and tosses her on the bed to make wild love. But I’d placed our baby boy on the center of the bed, where he napped silently. And I suspected that if I grabbed Jane and tried to romance her, she’d push me away and say, “I don’t need you mussing me up right now.” It’s the sort of thing she’d said before. At the time, I’d laughed because it made sense but now I know that that was the beginning of our decline, that what began as solid reasoning turned into dull living, and that once logic ruled our marriage, Jane and I never stood a chance. I tried to save us by convincing her to stop taking the pill, but I’d been fooling myself, and had only prolonged our misery for the life of a child.

“Is that what you’re wearing?” Jane asked.

I looked down at my outfit—jeans, boots, and my best plaid-printed snap shirt. “Well, I don’t look as good as you, Jane. You look beautiful.”

I tossed her the envelope of twenties. Her eyes widened as she looked inside, and she turned to me openmouthed. “How much?” she asked, the breath almost gone from her voice.

“About a thousand.”

“We gotta get you some new clothes,” she said and came over and sat in my lap and stroked the hair at the side of my head and kissed me full on the lips. Then she went into our closet and grabbed a cowboy hat. “Here you go, pardner,” she said, tossing it to me. “Put that on.” I tilted the hat on my head and Jane placed another lipstick kiss on my cheek and sashayed out the door with the cash. I picked up the baby and stood before the mirror. I think at a certain point men always see their fathers staring back at them. I half-wanted to apologize to my own son for this, but instead I grabbed his travel bag and bassinet and met Jane in the truck.

 

The barbecue was in full swing by the time we arrived. A tent had been put up, perhaps in the hope of rain. A flat, barren patch of dirt served as the dance floor. Jane and I found a table underneath the clear blue-black night, and she made a trip to the troughs of beer and tables of boxed wine to mingle with old high school friends. I watched her down two glasses of wine in the time it took for me to feed our son his bottle. She returned with a beer in each hand and I went for a plate of food. The party had already become a microcosm of our life: passing our son back and forth while running away from one another.

I noticed Zach at a table with Bill Keating, carrying on a conversation while tuning his guitar. Bill seemed unimpressed but humored Zach. I knew then that Zach and Laura wouldn’t be an item for long. Even Zach couldn’t charm a hawk like Keating. Laura was standing off to the side in conversation with a girlfriend, and remembering Zach’s description of their escapades, I admired her from afar. She was rounder than Jane, with curly blond hair that cupped her cherub face, her pink cheeks. Everything about her was soft; she had none of Jane’s hard lines. Her gestures were small and graceful. Zach finished tuning, tipped his hat to Keating, and grabbed Laura around the waist.

His band was mediocre, Zach more caterwauler than singer, but people danced all the same. And when a neighbor offered to watch the baby, Jane and I two-stepped for the first time in years—me stumbling along like an oaf as she led. “Still not much of a dancer, are you?” she said when we sat down. The alcohol had taken the playfulness from her voice. I rubbed the soft yellow hairs of our sleeping son. Jane turned away and looked into the distance as she drank a beer.

Zach excused himself from the stage after a while and let the others play some bluegrass. He came over to our table and we applauded as he approached and he pretended to wipe sweat from his brow. “Gets boring up there,” he said and sat down between us.

“You were great,” Jane said in a boozy warble and leaned in close. “Also,” she said, unable to keep her voice a whisper, “thanks for the cash.”

“Don’t thank me,” Zach said loud enough for me to hear. “I didn’t do the work.”

“I suppose it doesn’t matter where it comes from,” Jane said and took Zach’s hand. “Let’s have us a dance to celebrate.”

Jane and Zach blazed the ground with a fast two-step—her hips moving to his slightest touch. I clapped along with a large group of others when the song finished, but instead of calling it a night they stayed out for two more, the third a slow song. Jane, who had a friend bring her a glass of wine while she danced, let herself fall into Zach and rested her head on his chest. As he spun her around, our eyes met and he gave a slight toss of the head, as if to say, “What can I do?” But Jane, she was oblivious.

Laura Keating walked by my table and before I realized it, my arm had reached out and brushed hers. “How ’bout a dance, Laura?” I said.

Her sweet face beamed down at me. She shrugged her shoulders and said, “Yeah, sure.” Then she motioned to the bassinet on the table. “What about him?” she asked.

I’d forgotten about our son, sleeping beside me. “He’ll be fine,” I said and took her hand in mine.

We found a spot next to Zach and Jane, and Zach joked about me stealing his girl. Jane looked perturbed, not so much because I was dancing with Laura, but because we’d disrupted her dance with Zach. Laura didn’t bury her head into my chest, but she didn’t shy away and my right hand was excited, perched on her hip, the fault line where jeans met shirt. I spun her and she laughed and came back to me, her chest almost meeting mine. Zach spun Jane in response, but the alcohol had made her woozy and she stumbled back before he perched her upright. “No more of that,” he laughed, and Laura laughed along with him.

I looked at Jane’s distant eyes and wanted to be anywhere but there. I looked over Laura’s shoulder to the table where my son slept alone, wrapped in a blanket, the candlelight flickering over his chubby face. I worried about the flame. I worried he would forget about me. Did I think that the world would protect him? That sometimes the wolves leave the sheep alone? I wanted to run to him, to cradle him, and take him far away, but I just clutched harder at Laura, squeezed her hand, and balled her shirt in my fist, trying to focus on her uncomfortable smile.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Story PROPER BREATHING

Hunkered down in his cellar, Trevor practiced what Mr. Contellini had said. When you reach for the high notes, imagine you’re pinching a lump of coal between your butt cheeks. Tighten your muscles and squeeze so hard you could change the lump into a diamond. When you stand, imagine you’re a marionette dangling from a string. Pretend the string is tied to the center of the ceiling and also to the center of your head and that it twists around your backbone, suspending your body in a state of perfect posture. Chest forward, shoulders down. Stand tall. Now sing like that.

When school was in session last month, Mr. Contellini had taught Trevor the exercise where he lay on his back and lifted a five-pound dictionary on his stomach. This was supposed to help him learn how to properly breathe. If Trevor inhaled deeply, not just shallowly in his chest, his lungs ballooned and took up extra space within his rib cage, forcing his stomach to pooch up over the waist of his pants and raise the dictionary an inch or so higher. Mr. Contellini had shown Trevor how, if he pressed a fist into his belly, he could make more breath and sound come out of his mouth than he’d ever thought he was capable of producing. He could sound like St. Veronica’s church choir or like angels in Christmas movies, pure and haunting, with perfect pitch. In the final months of seventh grade, Trevor had hung out in the music room a lot to avoid the playground during lunch. He had stayed after school, shaking spit from the plastic recorders and dusting the xylophones because he’d gotten cut from the traveling track team and didn’t have the guts to tell his father. “Relax and pretend you’re sniffing a rose,” Mr. Contellini said, running his fingers through his silver hair or jotting a note in the blue book he used to record ideas for vocal warm-ups. “Then exhale like you’re breathing through a candle you don’t want to blow out because it’s your darkest hour and you need a light by which to see.”

Now it was mid-July, and lying on a cot in his basement, Trevor could relate to wanting a light somewhere in the heavy dark of things. His basement felt like a cave, cobwebs in every corner, walls of mud and slate. Pipes gurgled and hissed, dripping a dark brown liquid onto his forehead. Even though the temperature outside was a blistering ninety-four degrees, the air around him was cool and smelled of dense, moist earth. The twin windows, high above his head, showed only the grass that grew against the panes, and somehow the low ceilings and echoing space made his voice sound richer, even better than in the shower. On the first day of summer vacation, Trevor had set up a practice studio with a cot, a pitch pipe, a canteen of bottled water. Every morning, for the past five weeks, he’d descended to the basement where he sang scales until his throat hurt or practiced diction, repeating tongue twisters like “selfish shellfish” or “hemorrhoidal removal.”

He exhaled dramatically, starting with a high-pitched squeal and letting his voice plummet through lower, deeper ranges. The air spilled out of him and the dictionary on his stomach sank.

“Pipe down,” his father yelled from upstairs.

“Vocal chord warm-ups,” Trevor called back. “I’ll try and keep it quiet.”

But his own sound never annoyed him. It lifted him up. It made him feel light, but also big, and he imagined his voice leaving his mouth as vapor and changing colors as it rose through the darkness, blue or red, depending on whether he was singing loudly or softly, using his head voice or chest voice.

Tired of practicing, Trevor put on his headphones and listened to Arlo Guthrie. It was 1989, and kids in the neighborhood were wild for Madonna, Milli Vanilli, Fine Young Cannibals, New Kids on the Block. But Trevor wasn’t afraid of being different. He was afraid of going upstairs, where the kitchen table was covered with pill bottles and syringes, doctors’ phone numbers and rolls of gauze. The day before school ended, Trevor’s father had come home from the hospital without a lung. This was the second kind of cancer he’d fought in two years. Trevor’s mother blamed Agent Orange. Up until last year, Trevor had thought Agent Orange was a Russian spy who wore sunglasses and a trench coat and carried strategic weapons, like laughing gas, in the pockets of his pants. Each time his history teacher said, “Vietnam was a debacle,” Trevor envisioned his father waging fierce battles against Agent Orange in the rice paddies of Asia, unsheathing a stun gun to elude Agent Orange’s capture or sprouting a propeller from his helmet in order to fly free of Agent Orange’s grip.

Trevor could hear his father bumping around upstairs. His father said “Chrissake” to no one in particular, then spoke in a gentler voice when he called Trevor’s mother at work to ask her what he should have for lunch, an English muffin or a rice cake. Some days his father hobbled down the stairs to check on him, and Trevor raced to the back of the basement, where he couldn’t be seen from the bottommost step. “I’m busy memorizing ‘Alice’s Restaurant,’” Trevor would say. This was the longest song he knew, the song which bought him the most time alone, unbothered. In this way, Trevor managed to avoid one or two awkward encounters with his father each day. But today he hadn’t heard his father’s slippers padding down the basement steps or seen his father’s hand choking the wooden railing. When he opened his eyes, his father hovered several feet above his cot. His father’s brown robe draped open at his chest, melted butter-colored spots dotting his undershirt and boxers.

“I’m practicing breathing,” Trevor said to his father’s floating face. “If the dictionary doesn’t rise, I’m not breathing with my diaphragm. My breathing’s too chesty. Air’s not filling me up.”

“You look like a skinny Buddha,” his father said. “Your concentration’s frightening.”

Trevor’s father asked if he wanted to get some sun, and Trevor said no and went back to doing what he was doing: breathing in, then breathing out.

“You don’t want to see what those Harvey boys are up to?”

Trevor shook his head. His father turned and mounted the stairs. His robe swayed across the back of his vein-webbed calves. Halfway to the top, he turned around. “Meet me in the yard in five minutes. And get the bat,” he said. “We’re practicing hitting.”

 

Trevor found the bat in their garage along with the life preserver they used as home plate. He dropped the life preserver in front of the makeshift backstop, a woodpile. His father came outside wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt. His skin was gray. He no longer had eyebrows. This was weirder, Trevor thought, than the fact that he was bald. Lately, Trevor was aware of eyebrows everywhere he went, who had them, who didn’t, their texture and color and shape.

Trevor didn’t swing at the first ball his father pitched, a high and wide riser, an underhanded throw. Pitching seemed to knock his father off balance.

“You all right?” Trevor asked.

“Line up your knuckles. Keep your eyes on the ball.”

Trevor tried to correct his grip, sliding his fingers up the throat of the bat, squeezing harder.

“Relax,” his father said. “Watch those chicken wing elbows.”

Trevor swung and knocked a ball into the road. The next pitch, Trevor swung and missed. He picked up the ball and lobbed it back to his father. The ball fell short and rolled to his father’s feet. “Really put your body behind it,” his father said, and Trevor said, “That’s what I’m doing. I’m really trying to do that,” and in another smaller voice added, “You should put your body behind your pitches, too.”

They couldn’t end on a bad hit. That was the rule. Trevor popped a foul ball into his mother’s garden, and when he asked his father if it was good enough, his father said, “Nope.”

“Step into the pitch,” his father said. Trevor tried to relax, thinking of shifting his weight between his legs, rotating his hips. He fixed his eyes on the ball. When he swung at the next pitch, he hit it head on. The ball hit his father’s chest. His father grunted and collapsed onto his knees. For a moment, Trevor couldn’t move. He felt gutted and weak. His throat wouldn’t swallow. He couldn’t stop staring. His father put his hand in his mouth and bit down. Then he must have seen Trevor’s face because he removed his hand from his mouth and said, “I’ll be all right. Give me five minutes. Why don’t we pack it in?”  His father stuck his hand back into his mouth and bit down harder. “All right?” his father asked through his teeth. When Trevor said nothing, he said, “Buddy?”

Trevor walked to the front door, peeking back over his shoulder. His father hadn’t moved. In the kitchen, Trevor opened the freezer and pulled out a frozen bag of peas. He left the peas on the kitchen table next to the prescription bottles, so his father would notice them and ice himself when he came inside and took a painkiller. Then Trevor slumped downstairs to the basement, where he stood on his cot so he could see through the windows into the front yard. His father recovered his posture. He seemed to be catching his breath, and Trevor watched him remove his hand from his mouth and pull away the other hand, which rubbed the sore spot where the ball had struck him. His father tossed a ball above his head and tried to hit it with the bat. The ball rainbowed over the apple tree and dropped into their neighbor’s yard. Then his father threw the bat on the ground and kicked it.

Trevor had almost killed his father with his first and only hard line drive. He’d always dreamed of beating his father in a game of blackjack, or at bowling, but he didn’t want today to be the day he started beating his father at games for good.  To distract himself, he put on his headphones and tried to remember his proudest moment from seventh grade. It had happened one afternoon in May. He was wiping eighth notes from Mr. Contellini’s blackboard. In the music room, he was surrounded by cymbals and banjos, posters of Peter, Paul, and Mary and Joan Baez. When Mr. Contellini wheeled his wife into the room, Mrs. Contellini looked nothing like the picture of her on top of the music room’s piano. In the photograph, she kneaded dough and smiled at a camera, wearing pink lipstick that made her lips look bright and full. In person, her face was a droopy mask. Her mouth yawned open, and she couldn’t stand or move her fingers. Her skin was too big for her skeleton, and Mr. Contellini pushed her chair toward the blackboard because her hands were too soft to turn the wheels.

“Meet my apprentice,” Mr. Contellini said to his wife, gesturing toward Trevor.

Trevor waved and scrubbed the blackboard more dutifully than before.

Mr. Contellini wheeled his wife closer to Trevor and said, “Trevor, this is my wife, Antonia.”

Trevor peeled her hand off her lap and squeezed it and then dropped it. He left chalk prints on her thumb, which felt like it didn’t have any bones.

“He’s the one I told you about,” Mr. Contellini said, “the one with the voice like angels.” Mr. Contellini knelt beside his wife’s chair and looked up into her eyes. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped something from the corner of her mouth. Then he turned back to Trevor and said, “She’d like to hear you sing.”

Trevor suggested “Feeling Groovy.”

“How about ‘Danny Boy’?” Mr. Contellini said.

Trevor focused on landing softly on each note, not coming down too hard or heavy, too sharp or flat, and on letting the sound spill out of him like the breath that escaped his body when he slept. You couldn’t color a song with any phony feeling but when you sang a sad song you could think about sad things and make the notes sound better, truer, sadder. Singing to Mrs. Contellini, Trevor thought of the cocoons caterpillars cast over trees in summer after nibbling lacy patterns in all the leaves until they’re gone, and he thought of flowers without petals, fingers without bones.

When he finished the song, he stood in the music room’s silence. The string instruments hummed. He looked to Mr. Contellini for approval, and Mrs. Contellini closed her mouth and began to blink rapidly. Trevor was nervous she would cry on account of him. Her hands made a wobbly steeple against her chin. When her jaw unhinged, the bottom half of her mouth looked like a drawbridge reeled down after a tall ship’s passing.

“Lank lou,” she said.

Trevor nodded and reached for his wet paper towel so he could finish mopping the blackboard and then move on to polishing the piano.

The next morning Mr. Contellini caught him in the hallway, grabbed him by the shoulders, and nearly pinned him against the wall. “She hasn’t spoken out loud since September,” he said. “I thought it was gone, that skill, like walking or needlepoint.”  Trevor could smell coffee on Mr. Contellini’s breath and, looking up his nose, saw a thicket of black hairs. Mr. Contellini’s fingers dug into his shoulders, but Trevor felt giddy. Blood rushed to his head.

Trevor didn’t see Mr. Contellini’s wife again until the last day of school. She came to their concert in her wheelchair. Trevor stood on the bottom row of risers in his chorus black and whites. He thought, If she stands and walks across the cafeteria and steps around the sixth graders, sitting cross-legged on the floor, then my voice has healing powers; my lungs and pipes are magic. But she fell asleep during warm-ups, her head flopping over onto her chest. Trevor’s mother snuck in through the back door late and brought his father’s best friend, Buzz, and mouthed, “Traffic. So sorry,” and Trevor wondered if she understood how disappointed he was that Buzz was filling in for his father again. The chorus sang “This Land Is Your Land” and “Free to Be You and Me.” Mrs. Helgarty snapped a string on her guitar. Cassidy Sparrow, playing piano, had not practiced a single lick. Debbie Wheeler forgot the lyrics to her solo, and Trevor watched Mr. Contellini to see who would cry first. Trevor’s eyes felt sudsy, full of soap. Debbie Wheeler covered her mouth and said, “Oh my gosh!  Can we start all over?” Mr. Contellini dropped his conducting wand, and when he stood after retrieving it, his eyes were drippy, melting into his face. He wiped one eye with the back of his hand. Tears, Trevor thought. Those were definitely tears. When Mrs. Contellini awoke, the songs were all sung, and the school year was over.

 

Before Trevor’s father had met his mother at a bakery in Boston, he’d been a three-sport letterman at Malden Public High. In the fall, he’d run cross-country. In the winter, he’d played hoops. In the spring, he’d played baseball, hitting third in the lineup, manning second. He’d gone on to Berkshire State, pledging Kappa Sig and starting at small forward on a dark horse team that made it to the Division II Final Four. In the war, he’d piloted choppers and rescued bodies stuffed in bags. He’d come through in one piece, no bullet wounds, no shrapnel scars, his mind still intact, which was no small accomplishment, according to Trevor’s mother. If his father hadn’t been a tough guy, he most likely would have been a dead one. This was the point Trevor’s mother drilled into his head whenever he dumped on his father and asked her to repeat the story about the time she’d hitchhiked to Berkeley and slept on a school bus with Jimi Hendrix.

“Your father’s a bulldog,” she said, “but with the very best intentions.”

On Thursday night, Trevor’s father dragged him to Riverside field. In the backseat of the Chevy, Trevor pulled on his sport socks and cleats. His mother drove, and his father sat in the passenger seat and gave Trevor fielding instructions he was supposed to remember in his muscles. “Stand in the ready position. Don’t flinch when the ball hits your glove.”

Buzz came along for moral support and sat squished beside Trevor, his long legs folded up against his chest. Twice, Trevor’s mother looked over her shoulder and asked Buzz if she should scoot up her seat, and twice Buzz said, “I’m fine, Marcella. Don’t worry about me.”  Trevor didn’t worry about Buzz. When Buzz winked at him, his caterpillar eyebrows hopped above his eyes.

Trevor’s little league team was Glevins’s Vacuum Cleaner Sales and Services. Mr. Glevins was the coach. His son, Kevin, played first base and had biceps and blackheads more typical of a twelfth grader. Kevin batted first and knocked a fly ball over the center fielder’s head. Trevor batted last. His team was down 3-0 by the time he stepped to the plate. Bending his knees, he wished one strike was enough to send him back to the dugout. His father stood behind the backstop. The pitcher smacked the ball against his glove. Trevor tried to imagine the sound of his bat cracking the ball into the parking lot beyond the outfield, but his father broke his concentration. “Choke up,” he said. “No, choke down. That’s too high.”  Trevor swung at an outside pitch and missed. When the umpire called a strike, his father yelled, “Horseshit call. He checked his swing.”  Two more strikes, and Trevor slogged back to the dugout.

On the bench, Trevor heard his father sideline-coaching one of his teammates. “Nice and casual,” his father said, “don’t tense up your upper shoulders.”  At home plate, his father was breathing instructions down Kevin Glevins’s neck. One of his hands squeezed the top of Kevin’s bat. Players and spectators waited for Trevor’s father to stop interfering with the game. Kevin listened and nodded politely, but when Trevor’s father hobbled back behind the backstop, Kevin winked at his friends in the dugout, then rolled his eyes and pinched his nose and waved his other hand in front of his face.

In the final inning, a ground ball ricocheted off Trevor’s glove. Trevor followed the ball into right field and lost sight of it in the weeds. Everyone screamed, “Over there. Over there,” and pointed, and Trevor heard his father yelling, “Dammit, Trevor. Don’t quit now.”  Trevor glanced back at the spectators and, in his head, screamed for everyone to shut up and disappear.  His father stopped shouting, turned purple, and stumbled toward the trash bin. He coughed something pink into his hands. Trevor’s heart leapt into his throat. He stopped chasing the ball at the same time his mother jumped out of her seat and pushed through the packs of parents, siblings, and dogs. When she reached his father, she steadied him with one hand cupped beneath his elbow and wiped blood-tinted phlegm from his chin.

 

After the game, Trevor was afraid to go home. He didn’t want to be alone with his parents. Lately, whenever Trevor snuck upstairs during the day, he found his father catnapping on the couch, sections of the Boston Globe unfolded on his chest, the newspaper rising, falling, flapping with every shallow breath he took. In the parking lot, Buzz said he’d give Trevor a stick of gum if he named five players on the ’84 Celtics. Trevor said, “Larry, Curly, Moe.”  Trevor’s mother stood in front of the driver’s side door and told Trevor’s father he couldn’t get behind the wheel.

“Honey,” his father said. “Give me the goddamn keys.”

“You need to calm down,” she said. “I’m not going to let you drive.”

“Then I’ll walk.”

“I’m not going to let you walk.”

“Help me out here, Buzz,” his father said, holding his hands up to the sky.

Buzz said, “I’m sorry, Marcella. Maybe you should hand them over.”

Trevor’s father slid in behind the wheel. Nobody spoke. Trevor sat in the backseat and counted the stop signs his father drove through. When he’d counted five, he began counting houses with lights on in every window and, finally, he started looking for storage sheds and culverts he could live in when he ran away. He held his breath for all of Marlboro Street, seventeen houses long. Outside, it was darker but no cooler. Buzz knocked Trevor’s knee and whispered, “You win some. You lose some.”  Trevor pretended he couldn’t feel or hear him. When a pickup truck pulled out in front of them, his father jammed the brakes. The Chevy stopped short. Golf balls beneath the backseat rumbled toward the front. His father didn’t say a word, and Trevor studied his clenched face in the rearview mirror.

When they reached their driveway, his father brought the car to a stop in front of the garage. Buzz got out and said, “Adios, amigos,” saluted his father, and walked to his car. Then it was only the three of them. His father gripped the steering wheel. His mother rubbed his father’s neck. His father leaned into his mother and rested his head on her shoulder. The two of them stayed like that while cars passed on the road, shimmying over the ruts and potholes. Trevor hummed the loudest note he could sing without being heard.

 

That night, Trevor lay in his bed and stared at a string of white beads he’d strung over his bedroom window and a plastic Nerf hoop his father had nailed into the wall. He tried to practice breathing, but every breath was too throaty because his chest was too tight. When his mother knocked on his door and asked if she could come in, Trevor nodded. He felt his mattress slope where she sat on its edge. She smoothed out the bedspread where it wrinkled around her. His mother had the toughest hands Trevor had ever seen, thick and callused finger pads from playing the guitar forever. She could pick up hot pots and not get burned, prick her fingertips with pins, and they wouldn’t cut or bleed.

“You awake?” his mother asked.

“Just thinking,” Trevor said. When he was little, they played campfire in his room, shutting the door, turning off lights, draping a red tapestry over a single low-lit lamp. As they knelt around the lamp on the carpet, his mother played guitar and sang hippie songs, like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” or regular campfire songs, like “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,” and Trevor always sang “my body lies over the ocean” because that was how he thought it went.

“About what?” his mother said.

“Do you believe that music can make things happen?” Trevor said.

“Do you?” she asked.

“I don’t believe in superheroes or superpowers.”

His mother frowned. “I’m sorry you’ve had to grow up so fast.”

“But I sometimes think,” Trevor said, “maybe regular people have powers and they’re not smart enough to use them. That’s why crap things are always happening.”  Trevor touched his lip. “I’m not going back to baseball,” he said. “Will you tell him?”

“He gets riled up. It’s not your fault. Everyone has rough nights out.”  She grabbed hold of his foot and squeezed it. “You know how much watching you means to him.”

“Will you tell him anyway?” Trevor asked.

 

For the next few days, Trevor only emerged from the cellar to eat or sleep. Lying on his cot, he imagined he was losing his soul. Not the soul within his body, but the soul within his voice. When he sang scales, his voice was tinny and flat, and when he sang “Alice’s Restaurant,” his voice sounded thin as if he had just been socked in the stomach and was trying to sing without a heart and without oxygen. He could feel the basement’s darkness sucking away his desire. He no longer wanted to practice breathing or impress Mr. Contellini on the first day of school or sing so majestically Mrs. Contellini would rise from her wheelchair, do jumping jacks and cartwheels. He didn’t care if Debbie Wheeler got the better solo at their fall concert and he wouldn’t cry if she forgot the lyrics and spoiled the show.

One afternoon, Buzz stopped by and prank-called the town selectman, whom his father called “a flaming liberal.”  The hollow sound of his father’s laughter made Trevor want to run upstairs. Instead, he plugged his ears with his headphones and listened to the Bob Dylan song about everybody getting stoned. Another morning his father called down from the kitchen, “If you want to practice bunting, you know where to find me.”  But when Trevor tiptoed upstairs he found his father sitting in a chair beside the window, watching the municipal workers patch the road. He didn’t seem to hear Trevor open the cabinet or turn on the faucet or nearly break a glass.

“Dad?” Trevor said. But his father didn’t move. “Would you tell me if it was back, Dad?” Trevor asked. Yesterday, he’d found his father sitting at the top of the basement stairs. His father had just returned from an appointment, and his mind was somewhere else, somewhere untouchable, zooming ahead to the future or back to his childhood. Now, his father sat in the same room, but Trevor didn’t know where his father was. He didn’t turn around or acknowledge Trevor’s question. When Trevor coughed deliberately, his father didn’t budge.

 

During the first week of August, his father called down the stairs, “Did I ever tell you about the time I met Johnny Most?”

From the basement, Trevor yelled back, no.

“You know who Johnny Most is?” his father said.

“Nu-uh.”

“The Celtic’s play-by-play radio announcer. You should know that. Get on up here.”     

His father sat on the couch, propped up by a pillow. His robe fell open at the waist. Trevor saw his boxer shorts and his stomach and the hole in his boxer shorts that opened to his penis. Trevor didn’t know where to stand or how close to sit, so he hovered in the doorway that separated the living room from the kitchen. Even from a distance, his father’s freckles were large and dull like the brown spots on old people’s hands. His father waved him closer. Trevor took two steps into the room.

“Most people don’t know this,” his father said, “but back when I was playing ball at Berkshire State we sent a real solid team to the Division II Final Four. Me at small forward, John Havlicek’s cousin at the post. At the point, a scrappy black kid straight out of the Navy. We played the Rochester Hornets in the semis, meat-and-potatoes boys from upstate New York. I had twenty points and eleven boards by halftime, twenty-one and thirteen on the game.”

“That’s good,” Trevor said, standing stiff.   

“I was magic that first half. Every shot I threw up found the net. Every rebound bounced my way. After ten-odd years of being a solid player on every ball club I’d every played on, I was the goddamn MVP. Every muscle did exactly what I told it. All eyes were on me. Best feeling in the world.”

Trevor stepped back and leaned against the door jamb. His father fell back into the couch and pantomimed shooting a basketball toward the fireplace, right arm extended toward the ceiling, a flick of the wrist, a wince of pain. “Still with me?” his father asked.

Trevor nodded.

“Atta boy. Remember I said Johnny Most?  Well, at halftime, we walked past a concession stand on the way to the locker room, and there he was, buying hot dogs. He said, ‘C’mere a sec,’ and leaned into me so I could smell the coffee on his breath. He said, ‘BC passed over a real ballsy, brainy player.’  That was it. I had to keep on walking. He was standing in a line. But it was goddamn Johnny Most—smoker’s voice, that million-dollar grin—a man who knows a thing or two about basketball, telling me I was something special.”     

Trevor wanted his father to stop staring through him as if the thing worth seeing lay on the other side. He thought about telling his father about his singing, how he’d broken Mrs. Contellini’s silence, and how, when Mr. Contellini had shaken him by the shoulders, his breath had stunk, too. Instead he asked his father if he wanted a glass of water. “Not now,” his father said. He waved Trevor off. Outside, the municipal workers returned with steamrollers.

“What happened next?” Trevor asked.

“After I talked to Johnny?”  His father rubbed his neck. “After I talked to Johnny, I went into the locker room and listened to coach. Coach said one strong half doesn’t win a ball game. We needed forty strong minutes. I started thinking about the best-case scenario, me scoring forty points, going on to finals. Maybe I could transfer to Holy Cross, get a scholarship. Second half, Rochester threw their best defenders on me and they stuck like glue. Hacked me, slapped me, stepped on my toes, whatever it took. I got mad when the refs weren’t seeing it. I was a hothead back then, not like you, got hit with a technical foul, then another. Was tossed from the game with eight minutes left. Yada yada yada. Two years later, I went off to fly helicopters over the jungles.”

Trevor said, “You still scored twenty points in a half. How many people can say that?  Not me.”

“Not yet,” his father said.

“No, Dad. Not ever.”

“Come here,” his father said. “Let me see you.”  He held out his hand and, when Trevor came to the spot where his hand was waiting, his father took his wrist and pulled him closer so they were looking eye to eye. His father’s grip was gentle. He looked Trevor up and down, taking in his shaggy hair, his Dylan T-shirt, his Indian moccasins, his frayed blue jeans. “Never say never,” his father said. “I didn’t hit my growth spurt until the summer I was fifteen.”

“No, Dad,” Trevor said, softly. “I’m not ever going to score twenty points in a half.”

His father’s sickness smelled like last night’s chicken dinner in this morning’s kitchen trash. Trevor tried hard not to wince and turn away.

 

“How much do you want it?” his father called from the couch the following morning when Trevor went upstairs to grab a snack.

“Want what?” Trevor asked.

“Whatever it is you want with your singing.”

Trevor stepped into the living room. “To be bigger and better?” he said. His chest tightened. He was no longer sure of what he wanted from his music.

“How much?” his father said, sitting up.

“I used to want it a lot,” Trevor said. “Now, I want it . . . I don’t know.”

“You have to really want it,” his father said. “If you’re not willing to fight for it, someone else will want it more and they’ll come along and steal it.”  His father stood, and the couch cushions maintained the lumpy imprint of his shape. “Do you really want it?” he asked again.

“I guess,” Trevor said.

“Not ‘I guess,’ yes or no.”

“Yes,” Trevor said.

His father motioned Trevor to come closer. “I’m gonna tell you something I’ve never told anyone, not even your mom. Remember this name: Chip Watson, Master of Mass Hysterics.”

“Is that a nickname?”

“Stage name,” his father said. He paused and stroked his chin like a real big thinker. “I was going to tell jokes, be a comedian, make people laugh about things people can’t laugh about but need to. Like losing friends and minds and jobs. Ever hear of gallows humor?”

Trevor said, “But Dad, it’s not too late.”

His father patted Trevor’s head, mussing his hair and smiling in the same way Mr. Contellini had in June when Trevor suggested perhaps his wife could relearn how to walk this summer or relearn to knit with yarn and needles.

“Wait here,” his father said. When he returned from opening his special drawer in the kitchen, he handed Trevor a newspaper clipping. It was an audition announcement for Youth Pro Musica Choir for Boys. Tryouts were on a Tuesday, less than two weeks away. Trevor held the audition announcement, terrified and thrilled.

“Stand there and give me the best song you’ve got,” his father said, pointing to a thin cone of light that filtered in through the windows. His father slumped back down on the couch in the part of the living room where sun didn’t hit until late afternoon and where shadows in the morning cast dark circles under his eyes. Trevor started to sing “Scarborough Fair,” beginning tentatively and faltering on the first high note, but then gaining steam and sounding more and more practiced, smooth, and pure. He was as far as the part about parsley and sage when his father slapped a couch cushion. “That’s not going to cut it,” his father said. “Louder. Clearer. Much more confident.”

When Trevor began again, his father said, “Don’t do that tapping thing you’re doing with your foot. It’s distracting. And figure out what you’re going to do with your hands, either behind your back or at your side. Pick one.”

Trevor began one more time, knowing he would cry. He could feel his eyes burning, his lungs shriveling up like old balloons. He thought of Mr. Contellini and his wife and how even a grown man couldn’t fight back tears at a concert when a person he loved was letting go of life a little more each second.

“Hey,” his father said. “Back up and start again. Try not to flare your nostrils.”

Trevor put a firm foot down on the carpet. “Stop,” he said. “Let me do it my way.”

“But you don’t know the world. Sometimes you look—” his father frowned—“like such an easy target.”

Trevor said, “But you don’t know how to sing.”  When Trevor closed his eyes, he imagined pinching a piece of coal between his butt cheeks, squeezing so hard he changed the coal into a diamond. He imagined a string tied to the ceiling and also to the top of his head and that five weeks of breathing exercises had stretched his lungs to the size of industrial-strength trash bags.

“Don’t laugh,” he said to his father when he finished visualizing and opened his eyes.

“Is that what you do?” his father asked.

“And then I do this,” Trevor said. He did his exaggerated belly laughing, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, and the warm-up where he buzzed his lips like the revving engine of a motorcycle, broom, broom, broom, and he searched his father’s face for a sign that maybe once, because he liked the sound of his voice, or the tickle of a small noise forming and spreading throughout his chest, he had done these things, too. Trevor decided to sing the song about the sound of silence because he liked how a song could be both beautiful to listen to but also sad to sing, and he sang it to a chip in the plaster above his father’s head.

“What?” he said afterward.

“Nothing,” his father said.

“I thought you said something.”

“It was nice,” his father said. “You sang it nicely.”

“Nice enough to make the cut?”

“I can’t predict the future,” his father said. “All you can do is compete.”

“But if you had to guess?” Trevor said. “If you were picking, would you pick me?”

“I think I might,” his father said. “I think you’d make it damn hard not to.”

 

They trained like this for the next week and a half, held mock auditions in the living room in which Trevor’s father played the role of choir director, throwing his hands in the air when Trevor’s voice cracked on a high note or putting two fingers in his mouth and whistling when Trevor sang especially well. One day after practicing, his father showed Trevor a golden plate from Thailand, an oil painting of a horse, pricey knickknacks around the house which, his father said, were “worth something in case anything happened.”

“I’m not going to remember that,” Trevor said. “You’ve got to stick around.”   

Another morning, his father said, “Come here and show me that left hook I taught you.”  He held out his palms, and Trevor said, “I forgot,” and his father said, “Plant your back foot. Untwist your torso. Show me.”

Trevor wound up and swung his left fist. Gently, at less than a quarter-strength, he knuckled his father’s palm.      

On the day of tryouts, he slicked his hair with tap water and a comb. He buttoned a church polo over his favorite tie-dyed T-shirt. His father wore madras golf shorts, which hung unevenly off his hips, but which he told Trevor were more “artsy and sensitive” than his dung-colored robe and sweatpants. The church where the auditions were held was made entirely of stones. The altar was lit by sunlight that streamed through stained-glass windows and left red and purple shadows on the floor. The organ itself was small but had tremendous bronze pipes which spanned from the floor to the ceiling. The choir director, Yolanda Gregor, asked Trevor to stand beside the grand piano and sing arpeggios and sight-read notes. Her single black eyebrow rose in an arch on her forehead as she said “ooh” and “yes” and “lovely” in response to his sounds and warm-ups. When it came time for Trevor to sing his tryout piece, he expected his voice to be swallowed by the large vaulted space, but instead his music, his words—Morning has broken like the first morning—echoed back to him, sounding so rich and pure he half expected the kneeling disciples in the stained glass windows to lift a finger in a salute or wave. His father sat on the edge of a wooden pew, elbows balanced on the pew-back in front of him, hands clasped together in a knot that hid his face.

 

In the Chevy after the audition, Trevor said, “I feel like a thousand bucks.”

“I’m not going to bullshit you,” his father said. “You were something.”

Trevor asked if they could go through the drive-through at KFC.

“Sure, Bud, anything to celebrate.”

“I have one more thing,” Trevor said. “I feel kind of strange about asking it.”

“Shoot,” his father said.

“Can you say ‘hemorrhoidal removal’ ten times fast?”

His father repeated the tongue twister six times before his words slid together. Trevor cracked up so hard he couldn’t breathe.

At the drive-through window, Trevor asked his father to ask the attendant for chicken strips and bottled water. He said, “Did you know the best nutrition for your voice is water?”

When they got their food, his father parked beside a dumpster with a view of an abandoned factory.

“Want one?” Trevor asked, holding up a chicken strip.

His father touched his stomach and shook his head.

“One more thing,” Trevor said. “If I make it, will you come to my concert in October?”

“That’s at least two months away.”

“That’s why I’m asking now.”

“We’ll see,” his father said.

“No, promise,” Trevor insisted.

“Buddy, don’t push me on this one, okay?”

Trevor swallowed a mouthful of food and looked at the deserted factory with its No Trespassing signs and razor wire. He decided not to look at his father until he apologized and promised to go. When this didn’t happen, Trevor imagined asking Mr. Contellini to adopt him, and Mr. Contellini saying yes, and his father feeling slighted, like Trevor felt now.

“The cancer came back,” his father said, “in my other lung.”

Trevor dropped his food into his lap. “But one is all you’ve got.”

“Yeah, well.”  His father flicked his fingers against the steering wheel.

“You can have one of mine,” Trevor said. He’d expanded them. Now they were bigger.

His father touched his knee. “That’s not how it works. I think you know how it works.”

“I think I’m going to upchuck,” Trevor said. He opened the car door and vomited chicken strips onto the pavement. Then he closed his eyes and started humming inside his head. He plugged up his ears with his fingers. He put his head between his knees. Buzzing noises filled the car, and his brain.

His father said, “I couldn’t keep it from you much longer.”  He touched Trevor’s back.

Trevor unplugged his ears. “I already knew. I couldn’t stand it.”

Trevor felt his father’s arm around his shoulder, pulling him closer across the console between the seats. Without meaning to, Trevor fit into the space between his father’s arm and rib cage. He could smell his father’s smell and could feel his father’s nose in his hair, resting there or smelling his smell, or both. As much as Trevor didn’t want to, there, pressed against his father’s ribs, he could feel the alternating swell and shrinking of his father’s chest and could hear a lisping noise rattle through his father’s body. If his father’s lung stopped working, he would be the first to hear it quit.

“You’re braver than I knew,” his father whispered, “staring down such a big secret alone.”

When Trevor started to cry, his father’s grip tightened around his shoulders. Trevor dug his nose deeper into his father’s ribs. When he sniffled, his nose squashed against his father’s skin and bones and hurt. But he wouldn’t let go. He held his ground. He clung on tighter, daring his father not to pull away first.

THE URBAN COOP

Pay no attention to the soot on the buttercrunch, I told my new assistant.

You wash those, right? she asked.

We were looking at a row of lettuce in Mac’s Urban Garden. I didn’t tell her how often I’d caught my homeless harvesting team urinating near the zucchinis. Saint Charles with his cowboy hat and soiled cargo pants. Tiny Hanson with her high-heeled boots and cut-up snowsuit. The Neil Diamond lookalike in his black belted trench coat.

She didn’t know it, but I had plans for Sam. I wanted her to take over the garden. Truth be told, it didn’t even have to be her; it just had to be someone.

Produce to the people! she’d said in her phone interview, and I was sold.

Sam was now kneeling in front of the budding kale and Swiss chard. Her bangs hung in front of her eyes. She had on an expensive windbreaker and looked at the garden shears with awe. A half-hour into her tutorial and she was already clutching her back.

Two types of people came to Mac’s—those that were hungry, and those that wanted to feel good about themselves. But I’d learned feeling good about yourself could be hard work, backbreaking even.

And that’s tatsoi, I said to Sam. Good with mustard, so tell the boys and girls that free packets of mustard from McDonald’s work just fine if they need to stretch a meal.

I’m late for a therapy appointment, I said. Think you can do some weeding for an hour until I’m back?

My dog Biko sat next to me, protective but calm.

Sam shrugged her shoulders. She seemed unsure about the new job.

I was one month into the worst guilt of my life and, after I explained to Sam the danger of cabbage loopers and flea beetles, I sat down on an overturned bread crate and cried.

 

I didn’t deserve Biko. In fact, I’d thought about it, and I didn’t know anyone good enough for a dog like that. Loyal to the point of self-destruction.

Mac and I had a boat—the Excitecat 810—with a cabin. On weekends, we left the community garden in Raleigh to volunteers and drove to Beaufort, where we anchored and partied with friends. Biko always came along. A Lab mix, he loved the water. He’d pace the length of the boat, bark at passing crafts. His shaggy blond ears crimped in the humidity. His nails scratched the deck when he walked.

Mornings on the boat, I’d make instant coffee, Biko at my feet. We’d climb quietly onto the deck, careful not to wake Mac, and listen to the birds. Biko would sun himself with his chin on my legs until Mac was up. Then we’d motor over to Shackleford Banks to let Biko kick sand, chase gulls. Once we saw two deer swimming past the boat toward land; Biko had tremored with excitement, but stayed by my side, obedient.

Aside from a touch of separation anxiety, Biko was the perfect dog.

Then, one Saturday afternoon, our friends came by in an inflatable dinghy.

Let’s hit the Dockhouse for live music, they said. Climb in.

Room for Biko?  I asked.

I worry about his nails, someone said. We’re drunk, and if the boat sink . . .

The crowded boat burst into laughter. The sky was still blue, but we could see the moon. The water made a soft slapping sound against the side of the dinghy.

He’ll be fine on board our boat, Mac said, handing me a fresh beer. There’s nowhere he can go.

The cool aluminum can between my fingers, the reggae our friends played from a portable radio—these things made me believe in okay, in just fine, in letting go.

We’d never left him alone on the boat, and as the dinghy pulled away, Biko lifted his chin to the sky and whined. Some chord in my chest pulled tight. I looked away.

When we returned that night—singing, smelling of beer and sunburned skin—he was gone.

 

What do you want?  my therapist asked.

A baby, I said. I want a baby.

She folded her manicured hands and nodded. It struck me as a learned nod. I’d once heard that women nod their heads to build rapport—even when they don’t agree.

I’d started therapy after Biko’s accident. My guilt had consumed me. I needed direction. My therapist plumbed me like a well, pulling out fistfuls of trouble, messy tangles of fear and longing.

What prevents you from having a baby?  my therapist asked.

I’m getting old, I said. My partner is old. And if I can’t take care of my dog, I don’t deserve a baby.

Silence the inner critic, she said. How old are you?

Thirty-nine and a half, I said. But my partner is in his fifties. And I think he’s lukewarm on the idea. He’s not trying very hard.

I’d said to Mac a few months earlier, Wouldn’t it be fun if we had a full house?

You want another dog?  Mac had asked. More chickens?

Mac was a good person, a visionary. He was also fifteen years older than I was. We’d met at a bar in Duck, discussed our love of dogs, open water, and community agriculture. Our relationship was simple. We kept separate bank accounts. We didn’t fight.

Three years ago, Mac and I had driven into Raleigh towing a yellow ’74 Volkswagen Bug behind our pickup truck, Silkie bantam hens roosting in the backseat, two goats hanging their whiskered chins out the windows. Mac had taken a job as a professor of agriculture at the state college. We settled in a historic neighborhood one block from the prison. A year later, Mac got the government grant to build the community vegetable garden on a plot downtown. It was originally his dream, but someone had to manage things while he taught, and that person was me.

I like my simple life, Mac often said. I don’t need anything more than what I’ve got.

In vitro might be a possibility, my therapist said.

Yeah, I thought. A ten-thousand-dollar, pain-in-the-ass possibility.

 

When I returned from my appointment, I found Sam baffled by the tool sign-out sheet and food records.  She tossed her bangs aside as she scanned the clipboard.

Skinny Meatloaf?  she asked. One-Eyed Gloria Gaynor?

When the customers won’t give you a name, we name them after musicians they resemble, I said. There is One-Armed Snoop Dogg, Phil Collins with a Mustache, and so on.

Sam wrinkled her nose and brushed soil from her jeans.

It’s pretty obvious who’s who, I said, and wondered if it was really true.

I don’t know, Sam said, rubbing her lower back.

I felt like she was looking for a way out. Assistants never lasted long at Mac’s. From what I could tell, they liked talking about the job more than working it.

It isn’t meant as a sign of disrespect, I said. It’s just our way of tracking assets.

I signed out a hoe to Neil Diamond. The strawberry patch could use weeding, I told him.

I had to remind myself I was dealing with people, not characters. Our Neil Diamond really looked like Neil Diamond, wily eyebrows, thin lips and all—but there was no swagger in his comb-over. Tiny Hanson told me he had a daughter in town that wouldn’t see him, that he paced her neighborhood on weekends hoping to catch her on the way to her car.

Wife left him long time ago, Tiny said. Girl probably ain’t even his.

I turned to Sam.

By the way, I said, there are brown spiders that scare the bejeezus out of me in the strawberry patch. Jumpers. Wear gloves over there.

This isn’t . . . she said. She stared at her hands and began to clean beneath her nails. Ugh.

Waste of time, I said, hoping I wasn’t scaring her off.

The soil had burrowed into the lines of my hands months ago. When Mac and I went out to a nice dinner, I painted my nails harlot red to hide the black earth.

Sam’s hair was shiny and her skin was smooth. I found myself thinking about Sam’s ripe ovaries. You’d be easy to knock up, I thought. You have all this time.

I wanted to borrow her body for the weekend.

A handful of customers—or as the head of the neighboring condominium homeowner’s association called them, vay-grints—had gathered for work and scattered themselves across the four garden quadrants. Buildings that weren’t quite skyscrapers made shadows over the plants. The bus station spilled over with people on their way to work. Two blocks over, Not Grandmaster Flash played The Love Boat theme on his trumpet, which he often did until he took a break for lunch.

Saint Charles tugged at my sleeve.

I been vomicking again, he said.

I dug into my purse and fished out a roll of Tums. Sam stood next to me, eyes down on the compost.

Don’t eat out of the trash if you don’t have to, I told Charles.

He crushed the tablets with his teeth and sauntered off to tend the kale.

When we got the grant money, this place was covered in cigarette butts, I said to Sam. And now . . .

I made a sweeping gesture with my hand, as if advertising the beauty of the place. Old oaks, their roots knotted and bulging underneath the cement sidewalk, were budding. I had a feeling I would hate the gloved ladies who had planted them a hundred years ago, but that didn’t keep me from thanking them for the shade when the summer started to bear down.

This isn’t what I expected, Sam said.

And then I lied.

It will be if you give it time, I said. Hard work can turn any old dump into a fertile paradise.

 

They had found Biko in the last light, disoriented, paddling out to the horizon. At first the fishermen said they could not believe what they saw.

We thought it was a porpoise, one said.

Biko had been dehydrated and confused. He’d snapped when they lifted him into their boat.

Desperate and lonely, he had swum a mile into the open sea.

 

That evening, I returned home from the garden with a headache and a bag of early cucumbers.

I don’t think Sam is going to work out, I said. 

Mac slid his reading glasses down his nose and laid the paper on the kitchen table, a lab table he’d salvaged from an auction sponsored by the school system. I wondered how many earthworms had been butchered in the name of science on the surface where we now ate dinner.

It’s karmic, you know, I’d told Mac. We’ve done this really bad thing with Biko, and now . . .

You’re paranoid, he said, rising to rub my shoulders. And superstitious.

I sat crosslegged on the kitchen floor and scratched Biko’s stomach. His back legs twitched when my nails found a good spot.

Pregnancy test was negative this morning, I said.

I felt my bottom lip begin to quiver.

Don’t cry, Mac said.

He began washing cucumbers. I pressed my face into Biko’s coat.

I wondered who knew me better—my husband, or my dog, who sat up and shoved his nose into the crook of my neck, resting his chin on my collarbone, as if to say there, there, there.

 

At six a.m., Biko touched his cold nose to my shoulder, a leather lead in his mouth. I put overalls over my nightgown and grabbed a cup of feed from the garage.

I kept an urban coop in the backyard stocked with Silkie bantams. The hens were gentle and broody, good mothers who’d go so far as to raise eggs that weren’t their own. An ornamental breed, they produced tiny eggs and paraded around the coop like Solid Gold dancers, their legs ensconced in black feathered pantaloons, heads topped with Afro-shaped tufts.

Biko and I fed the Silkies each morning. We jogged out to their fenced-in coop, crouching down inches away from the gate. The ladies sprinted from their henhouse down the wooden ramp, lunging at the ground in fevered hunger.

The first time I saw a chicken run to food, I was inspired. A full-on sprint, a stride like a gymnast doing a split.

And that’s how you get what you want, I thought. Go all out or give up.

The morning was still cool. I could see the barbed wire atop the tall prison fence a block away. I stretched from side to side, trying to warm up my body. These days I woke feeling stiff, mechanical. Old.

As my hens clucked and the lone rooster postured, I imagined a baby’s lips tugging at my breast. Hot breath on my skin, innocent eyes.

I’m sorry I eat your children before they hatch, I said to the hens.

 

One of the perks, I told Sam later that morning, is that you can take home produce weekly.

I was going for the hard sell.

Tiny Hanson sat on the sidewalk with her feet spread out in front of her. The cuffs of her snowsuit pinched her swollen ankles. There was gum on the bottom of her scuffed leather pumps. Tiny took one off and rubbed her heel. She trailed Sam with suspicious eyes.

I don’t know if I like kale, Sam said.

You learn to love it, I said.

The truth was, every year I reached a point where I couldn’t look at another leaf of kale, another fanned-out collard the size of my face. Hot sauce, garlic, and brown sugar be damned—by the end of the summer I only had eyes for ice cream.

Last September, pounds of kale and chard wilting in the back of my sweltering truck, I sucked down a milkshake at the Dairy Barn, let Biko lick the cup when I was done. I lay down on a picnic table and looked up at the sky, one hand on Biko’s belly.

Waste not, want not, I had lied.

The sound of children laughing, the sight of their ice-creamed faces had made my body cramp with need. I wanted to lay my hands on their chapped faces, comb their soft hair with my fingers.

While Sam weeded, Tiny approached me, shoved her bad breath and broken teeth in my face.

What, she said. I’m not enough help?  You don’t love me no more?

I love you just fine, I said, stepping back. Sam’s just here to learn.

Ain’t no love gone fix me now anyway, Tiny said scratching her neck.

Let me see that, I said, peering at the scaly rash underneath her chin.

I’ll bring calamine lotion Monday, I said. Don’t scratch. You might spread it.

I cupped the back of Tiny’s head.

You’re going to be okay, I said.

Sam came up to us. She had dirt on her forehead and a million questions behind her eyes.

How do we feed everyone? Sam asked. You can’t eat an uncooked potato.

Tiny sauntered off, muttering, And who’s the prized whore now?

You don’t have to worry about potatoes until June, I said. But there’s a stack of black stockpots in the shed. Start a fire in the pit, put the grate down, and boil the potatoes. The boys and girls will bring their own ketchup packets, duck sauce, salt. Smashed peas aren’t bad for flavor.

A fire?  Sam said.

The tomatoes are what you have to worry about now—they go fast, I said. The boys and girls won’t riot, but they get grabby. No one but Tiny really likes turnips—you can leave those in a grocery bag for her.

I don’t think I can do this, Sam said.

Just stay on until Monday, I said. Please. Mac and I are out on the boat this weekend. Managing the garden’s not as hard as it sounds—just different.

Sam rubbed the back of her neck and raised her eyebrows.

I need this weekend, I pleaded.

She fiddled with the Velcro on the outside of her glove.

Maybe you could be a surrogate mother, I thought, looking at Sam’s healthy hair and strong legs.

I think I’d be better off doing advocacy work, Sam said.

When the sun is setting and you’ve got ten or so customers sitting crosslegged on the sidewalk, quiet as can be with their mouths full, you’ll see, I said. They’ll drift away, and you’ll find yourself alone in the garden, kale to your knees, feeling good. I always sit for a moment in the center, a handful of strawberries in my lap, and watch the sun disappear.

I don’t want to be here alone, Sam said.

Tiny will help you, I said. Tiny always helps.

Sam was quiet.

I’ll pay you under the table, I said. Whatever it takes.

 

I came home to pack for the boat trip. I groped for my travel toothbrush in a drawer full of ovulation indicators—plastic wands that could divine when I was most fertile. Also stuffed in the bathroom drawer: my digital basal thermometer and ovulation calendar.

Biko was on his back in our bed, rooting through the pillows, dirt from his nails falling into the sheets. I didn’t care. I’d let him do anything. Lick my cereal bowl, chase the chickens. I would atone forever.

I thumbed through old clothes, clothes I thought I should give to Tiny. Frayed sweatshirts, grass-stained shorts.

Mac and I promised we’d stay out of the customers’ personal lives, but I had made exceptions. Recently, I’d purchased bedroom slippers for Tiny so she could rest her feet at night. I slipped anti-inflammatories and Tums to Saint Charles to soothe his stomach.

Without realizing it, Mac’s Urban Garden had become more mine than his. These days, I might not know myself without it. My therapist said I had a garden full of orphans.

I spied my negative pregnancy test in the trash can.

Piss on it, I said.

 

Driving to Beaufort, Mac pointed out his family farm, the old farmhouse now a hay barn for someone’s heifers.

There are pieces of me everywhere Down East, he said. An uncle here, a cousin there. Most with no teeth to speak of.

All the reason to make more pieces, I said. Better pieces.

Sam called as Mac and I were settling in on the boat. Mac whisked two bags of groceries into the galley. I figured he was disappearing on purpose. Somehow, garden business had become my business.

Jesus Christ, Sam said, panting into the phone. Saint Charles took a disproportionate share of collards. Phil Collins with a Mustache is selling our zucchini flowers for a profit at the farmers’ market on Blount Street.

That’s okay, I said. I wish Phil had asked, but we don’t use the flowers.

Not Grandmaster Flash bit into an onion like an apple, Sam said. Tiny tied prayer flags into the pea fencing.

Not all bad, I said.

But that’s not the worst, Sam said. This morning, Our Neil Diamond pulled his penis out and danced around the cantaloupe patch screaming, Impotent melons! Impotent melons!

What’s important, I said, is that you keep the shears and the hoe close to you, and cultivate a sense of authority.

I quit, she said.

 

The day animal control returned Biko to us, Mac and I had driven home to Raleigh. Biko was limp with exhaustion and had just come off intravenous fluids. He thumped his tail once or twice upon seeing us.

Mac and I could hardly speak to each other. Our guilt was sickening.

I did not say it, but I blamed Mac. He was too easygoing. He did not play worst-case scenario. Next time, I would listen to my gut.

I had held Biko in the backseat of the car as we drove down the pine-lined highway. I had spooned his tired back, rubbed his ears. I massaged the muscles I felt would be tired after his big swim. My fingers ached from planting, but I did not stop stroking Biko. My heart was subterraneous, a root crop, damp, hiding from the sun in shame.

 

Sometimes, I attended Quaker Meetings with Mac at the local Quaker nursing home where his mother kept a room. The meeting house had a sign. It said: Practice Radical Honesty.

Once, his mother had leaned over to me and said, into the silence, My breast hurts.

It could be that simple, I thought to myself on the boat. I could tell Mac how much I want a baby. I could tell him that I don’t think he’s trying, that we can do more.

I hung up the phone from my conversation with Sam and went to find Mac on the deck. Biko trailed me.

Mac sat next to the motor with his feet in the water. He smoked a cigar and looked satisfied with life. It had taken me years to find comfort in his silence.

Sam quit, I said. And I want a baby. I’m willing to do anything. Things that cost money.

Mac nodded his head and blew smoke toward the clouds.

I peeled off my T-shirt and jumped into the water. Biko followed.

I closed my eyes and felt the water rush over my head. If Mac left me, I could take up agility training with Biko. We could walk the halls of hospitals. We could corral geese at airports. We could find a sperm donor.

But what if it was me that didn’t work? What if I was rusted inside, imperfect, past my prime?  Cursed?

Biko and I paddled around the boat in circles, sun on our noses. I let him swim to me, felt his claws on my arms and chest. I didn’t mind the welts, not now. I inhaled the smell of his wet fur. In a moment, we would both be tired enough for land.

Stay with me, I said to him, and I will make it up to you. Again and again.

Treading water, I turned to look at the fading sun. There was something appealing about an uninterrupted horizon.

One of the fisherman who had found Biko said to the newspaper: The poor dog had salt on his face from the sea water. He was so tired.

I imagined Biko swimming out into the open water. Sometimes, you didn’t know what you were after, I thought. Maybe there was a speck on the horizon, and you followed it, hoping for the best.

I pictured Sam leaving the garden, knocking off her boots before driving away in her luxury hybrid. Tiny would sleep there, watch out for things until I was back. She’d shoo Phil away from the early cucumbers, keep Saint Charles from eating too much fruit. I never asked, but I knew Tiny would do it anyway.

Tiny with her tired feet and cavernous mouth. Tiny with her varicose veins and dirty snowsuit. Tiny discarded by her family. Tiny with her whispered threats and kind actions.

Mac helped Biko and me back onto the boat. I kissed his forehead and went to shower. As I stood underneath the sliver of water, I panicked. I needed to know that Biko was safe. I ran out onto the boat deck, towel half-heartedly tucked between my breasts. Biko and Mac were napping on the bow, a bottle of beer in Mac’s hand.

Trust me, Mac said, both eyes closed, fingers tangled in Biko’s ears. Just trust me.

He removed my towel with one hand, led me to the cabin with the other.

 

Sex was always better on the boat. There were no neighbors to speak of, no gardens to weed, just time to kill.

After making love, Mac peeled himself off of me and offered me a towel.

I shook my head.

Biko put one paw on the side of the bed.

Do you ever get tired of begging?  I asked Biko, though I was happy to have what he wanted.

Mac left the room to make two drinks.

No rocks for me, I said.   

Ice on the boat was made from frozen sea water. To me, it filled bourbon with the taste of crustaceans, shells, salt, soft-bodied mollusks, air, water—the building blocks of living things.

Raise your hips, I’d read, to let gravity help the sperm make its way to your eggs. I gripped my hip bones and thrust my pelvis into the air.

Just days before, Tiny had lifted up her shirt and showed me her sagging breasts, the jagged white stretch marks surrounding her areolas.

My babies done sucked me dry and moved on, she’d said.

I put my legs up on the wall to hold all my chances inside. My greatly diminished, ugly chances. The boat rocked with Mac’s shifting weight. Biko paced the stairway, keeping one eye on me and one eye on Mac.

Use me all you want, I said to my unborn children. There is nothing I won’t give you.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Story THANK GOD WE’RE YOUNG, OTHERWISE THIS WOULD BE TERRIFYING

I

The summer has been so lazy—one week bleeds into the next and congeals into a sticky pool of cigarettes, weed, Smirnoff Ice, boys, being fifteen and unable to drive. The arc of days begins filled with the possibility of what will happen at night: a movie, a party, smoking a joint down by the river, eating ice cream at Kimball’s, maybe swimming in Sarah’s pool. Life can’t be more full of vigor and youth. The girls are young and slim and smell like cheap perfume and their mothers’ body wash. They wear too-tight jeans that pinch the slight pudge of their lower backs; it spills over the tops of their pants but is reigned in by the spandex of their tank tops. They travel in packs of three or more, giggling loudly and shrieking when they meet other girls who are cooler than them. In a sad, obvious way, their heavily made-up eyes stare longingly at the models in Cosmo and Glamour and they wish to be tall and thin like that, have a mane of shiny hair like that, have lips glossed and pouty like that.

The summer becomes hotter and their skirts grow shorter. They convince their mothers to leave them at the town beach for the day where they lay out in Victoria’s Secret bathing suits and suck on Blow Pops and the married men try not to stare. They want to lose their virginity but are scared. Emma had a babysitter who told her that it hurt, that it wasn’t much fun but that it was better if you are drunk. The boys they would do it with are part of a crowd more popular than theirs. These boys golf at Greene Valley during the day and go to Bobby March’s house later to play video games and get stoned. Sometimes the popular girls join them. Emma thinks Bobby March has the most luscious brown eyes and she tells this to Allie and Sarah who laugh at her, but she takes some comfort from the fact that Bobby March’s birthday is the same day as her half birthday. She can always talk to him about this if she ever gets the chance. When they hang out with the Powder Mill boys, they sprawl on their backs on the couches and beds so that their stomachs look flat. They wonder if Mike thinks they’re as hot as the Playboy girls he has tacked to his walls. When the boys talk about sex, the girls pretend to have done more than they have—a silent pact between them not to reveal their ignorance. Later that night they get high on Allie’s trampoline. The air is warm and the girls are wearing T-shirts and boxers, the three of them: Sarah, long-limbed and golden; Allie, petite and curvy; Emma, average and freckled. They swish their hair and talk about boys and Sarah says she wishes she hadn’t eaten so much pizza for dinner. The fireflies spark and extinguish in the tall grass and each stoned girl wants to be better.

 

II

Emma sleeps over at Sarah’s house and they walk through Macdowell at three in the morning. The town is deserted, not even a dog barking. Empty parking spaces like missing teeth line the main street. It feels good to sneak out. It feels best to smoke the Marlboros stolen from Delay’s. Sarah is so beautiful and she doesn’t see it. They imagine tomorrow’s headlines reading Two Underage Girls Brutally Murdered, Found with Cigarettes. I wonder if our parents would be at all concerned that we were smoking, says Sarah. Mine would, says Emma. Ugh, this weather is awful for my hair, says Sarah, It’s frizzing everywhere. Mine too, says Emma. They think about what life is like outside this town, a small cage on the Eastern Seaboard. If their conversations are being duplicated by other girls in other places, would those girls have frizzy hair too? But the talking only brings them back to Sarah’s for sleep and pancakes the next morning. Emma always flips them too soon—she likes them gooey on the inside—and Sarah won’t let her near the pan.

They go to the mall and try on expensive dresses at Arden B. and Jessica McClintock. At CVS they buy Nair and waxing and highlighting kits and yellow nail polish. The dressing room mirrors depress them; nothing fits right and no one speaks on the drive home. Allie’s a double D, Emma only a B, and Sarah a C verging on D. I have the best grade, says Emma. That night they burn themselves from leaving the Nair on too long. Emma tries to dye Sarah’s hair but all she does is bleach a large circle in the middle of her head. Sarah doesn’t notice in the dim light of Allie’s room. Allie’s older brother is visiting for the weekend and is sleeping downstairs with his girlfriend. They drop pennies through the heating grate and giggle and don’t open the door when he comes upstairs to yell at them. Before they go to bed they tell each other what-if stories. What if I go to prom with Bobby March? says Emma. He would pick me up in a black Cadillac limo and my dress would be yellow. He would keep his hand on my lower back the whole night. Yeah, says Sarah, and then you would puke all over him at the after-party. What if, says Allie, I fall in love with the German exchange student next year and I end up moving to Berlin? We’d all go visit you, duh, says Emma. But that would never happen.

Sarah sees her hair and is upset and things are tense for a little while, but the next weekend Mike’s dad is out of town and everyone is drinking in his basement. Emma tells her parents she’s staying at Allie’s. No one knows how to play pool but the girls lean over the table and run their hands up and down the cues. Zeb, the pot dealer, is there. He tells Emma he burned his eyebrows in an accident in chemistry class. It’s bullshit, says Sarah to Emma. Everyone knows he plucks them. Allie sits on his lap and giggles for most of the night. The Powder Mill boys are on the porch talking about football and joining the Army. Travis wants to be a Navy SEAL. Emma’s shirt is small; she tugs it down every other minute. Jake has been looking at her all night but she ignores him because he can’t make it better. She drinks too much Twisted Tea and Mike teaches her what cum tastes like.

 

III

The girls are more assured. They walk with a pronounced swing in the hips and begin to order coffee from Twelve Pine. Their parents’ liquor is mostly water by now, but no one has gotten in trouble for this or for the conspicuous absence of cereal the mornings after they’ve been smoking at Emma’s. They go down to the river behind her house and watch headlights disappear into the covered bridge and then reappear a few seconds later. They buy weed with their small paychecks and allowance money. Allie convinces her stepbrother, Jake, to give them beer and cigarettes and to tell them about strip clubs and fake IDs. They get buzzed from red wine in plastic water bottles before barbequing with Allie’s parents. They smoke out of apples and bent aluminum cans. Emma cuts her hair short and it looks like a triangle of poodle curls around her face. She feels fat and dumpy most of the time and when Jake tries to hold her hand she pulls it away. Their parents are saddened and confused by their daughters’ behavior. The girls hear the murmured worry at night as their parents try to understand how smart, beautiful girls can act so rebellious and ungrateful. Allie’s parents are at work and Zeb comes by. It does hurt, Allie tells them. There wasn’t any blood, though. It would have been hard to get it out of the sheets. Emma writes a poem called “Virgin,” because that is what she is, but does not show it to Allie.

They get high in Emma’s attic and Alex is there. He tells Emma it’s her fault that Marley dumped him in the eighth grade and Emma cannot stop crying because when Marley died it made a hole somewhere in her that she can’t repair with drugs or alcohol or boys. It hurts so much that sometimes she plays Korn as loud as possible and sobs on her bedroom floor. The movie that week is Varsity Blues and the girls snap their gum standing in line outside the theater, tugging on their hair and eyeing the boys. Sarah flirts with Alex and Emma’s stomach drops out because she likes him. She watches him flirt back. Before the movie starts Sarah gets up and slowly slides her body against the seats in front of them. Her ass is in Alex’s face as she excuses herself to get a Coke. Bobby March and Tessa Johnson make out loudly in the front row and Emma is miserable. Pop quiz, says Sarah after the movie. Shoot, says Emma. Where’s my pink Cadillac parked? In your basement, yells Emma. Gold star, says Sarah and it’s a little better.

They go to a party that is busted by the cops. They run into the woods and the next day Sarah is covered in poison ivy. Allie and Emma bring her vanilla ice cream and ginger ale and watch reruns of Daria and Undressed for hours on her couch. Remember when we ran onto that lawn and the guy came out with a shotgun? I thought that only happened in movies, says Allie. We’re in the middle of bumfuck, mumbles Sarah. Her face is so swollen they can barely understand her. I need to start running for preseason, says Emma. It will be strange to play soccer without Marley. Emma remembers how she was getting on the bus when Marley went by and said she was riding home with Austin and Celia.  Love ya babe, Marley said.  The way Marley was, Emma could see the curlicued bubble letters written in pink glitter pen spelling out the word Luv over Marley’s head.  That night Emma’s mother woke her up and told her about the car accident.  Now her parents make her go to therapy but in the office she doesn’t have anything to say and when she finally speaks it is to tell the therapist that she has sleeping problems which is so far from the actual issue it’s as if Emma is saying nothing at all.  Before the funeral she put on eyeliner and mascara so everyone would know she’d cried because she loved Marley as much as they did but also because it was Marley who taught her how to wear makeup when they were nine, it was Marley who became popular freshman year but still talked to Emma about boys and secrets, it was Marley who was really everything Emma wants to be.

Allie goes to bed early and Emma stays up with Jake and they make out. Emma tells Sarah first—tells Sarah that he ground his mouth down on hers and Sarah tells Allie and Allie doesn’t speak to Emma for three days. When she does speak it is to say that she is kind of pissed because Jake is her stepbrother. They both know that Allie likes Jake but can’t do anything about it because if it was weird and icky in Clueless it would be even ickier in real life. They both like how Jake taps his thumbs on the steering wheel in time to the music. They both want the flannel shirts he wears that smell like Barbasol and chain-saw grease. I will give you this whole beer, he tells Emma, if you can sing all the words to “Ain’t Going Down (Til the Sun Comes Up).” And then he teaches her about country music and she is in love. “Fishin’ in the Dark” is her favorite song now so she stops playing Korn but still is sad. She smokes a joint out of her open window at night and a few times an owl hoots in the hundred acres across the dirt road. Why does your room smell? her mom asks the next morning. Incense, she tells her. And then later she tells her mom that she hates her and her mom says, I don’t have anything to say, but Emma keeps screaming at her because she just doesn’t get it because she’s so old and didn’t have sex until she was in college and doesn’t understand that this is already a big deal. Sometimes you’re a bitch! says Emma. There’s a long silence. I don’t want to see your face, says her mother. Emma doesn’t call Allie or Sarah. She calls Jake and he takes her to the railroad tracks and she balances on the thin rail and falls into him. The night is muggy and full of crickets and peeping frogs and he wraps his arms around her and she wants it to last and last and last.

The girls have French-braided hair. It escapes in wisps around their faces and their lips smell like strawberries. They wear denim skirts and foam sandals that make sucking noises when they walk. They keep close together through the crowds of people. Their skin is smooth and covered in glitter. They share fried dough drenched in powdered sugar and cinnamon sugar and eat soggy salty french fries from cardboard bowls. They buy glowstick bracelets and necklaces and when boys spray them with neon Silly String they scream loudly but love the attention. Boys with T-shirts stuffed into back pockets of baggy jean shorts walk in groups with sneakers unlaced and hats to one side. They spit next to where they stand and talk loudly, jeeringly, about girls. They boast about who or what they’ve done but when a girl stands too close to one of them the boy becomes silent and unnerved. They walk with legs spread, pants below asses, boxers around their hips. Emma stares at one of their stomachs where the muscles begin to v and when he catches her she blushes and looks away. The girls eat soft serve and hope they are licking the cones suggestively. Emma vaguely wishes she were young enough for the bouncy castle they passed further back in the fairgrounds. Mike comes over and says that they should sit with all the guys. They follow him up the grass hill and there are Travis Donnely, Joe, Dave, and Jake eating hotdogs dripping greasy and mustard-ketchup, drinking whiskey and Coke from soda bottles. Travis offers Emma a sip. She takes it but there’s too much whiskey and then she watches Jake tug Allie’s braid so she takes another. The air is saturated with propane and voices, shrieks, laughter, smells like fried food and beer. A little girl skins her knees and is crying. Lost children are announced over the loudspeaker and a man says the fireworks will begin in half an hour.

When dusk comes the sun falls quick this late in August. The sky blue as dark glass stretches vast over the crowd. The girls must sit awkwardly on the ground with their legs crossed because of the skirts they are wearing. Mike flicks pebbles at Sarah and they talk about going swimming in her pool later. The fireworks explode in bursts of bloodred peonies, electric blue dahlias, weeping gold willows that cascade so low Emma thinks the sparks will fall on her, crackling white crossettes and horse tails. She leans against Jake lightly and he tickles her right ear with his fingers. Her breath hitches completely and she can’t help looking at Allie to see if she is watching but she is staring up at the bursting chrysanthemums and humming to herself along with the music.

 

IV

The girls wear their sweatpants low, and tight shirts expose a strip of pale skin just above their pubic hair. They paint their nails black or dark purple and never leave the house without mascara and eyeliner. Their key rings are noisy with charms and bottle openers. They snap gum with authority and walk with backs arched, flat bellies sticking out, their hands shoved into pockets, purses slung over their soft shoulders. When they go shopping it is for bumper stickers and for hemp to make anklets. The walls of their rooms are covered with song lyrics and movie quotes. They try to stay out of their houses as much as possible. They buy coffee and sit in the park downtown and talk about going to the city one of these weekends or about how awkward it would be to buy condoms from the pharmacy where they know the cashier. The girls are fuller in the face, more conscious of the attention to their bodies. They pierce their cartilage, navels, noses, lips, eyebrows. Allie buys a glass bowl from Zeb and they inaugurate it by smoking in her car with the windows rolled up while they listen to the Backstreet Boys, Greatest Hits: Chapter 1. Emma washes dishes for a catering company. Her boss sits her down and asks her why she is tired all the time. She doesn’t tell him it is because she stays up late on AIM talking to boys about the things she would do. She buses weddings in the sticky July heat and loathes the sweat that yellows the armpits of her white shirt. She loves-hates the beautiful older boys who work with her. She knows she is ugly because they flirt with Abby Birch, Lauren Stevens, and Ashley Dumont, but not her. Somehow those girls manage to look sexy in black pants and awkward shoes and button-up dress shirts while Emma eats the leftover desserts as she clears the plates. She spends her paycheck on cheap hoop earrings from Claire’s and a new bra but Travis rips the lace and she loses an earring on the same night.

The girls look down on the freshmen who come to parties wearing tight pants and oversized black sweatshirts with too-dark makeup and who get too drunk too fast and command the attention of the boys. The freshmen who think they’re better because they’re younger but who are actually just dumb bitches. The girls are possessive of each other and talk loudly in a diner about parties and boys and concerts. Allie comes over to watch Emma’s TV because Allie’s stepmother, who is the wicked kind, always says the volume is too loud. Sarah doesn’t like to talk about sex because she is afraid of having it but Allie’s already had anal and couldn’t go to Boston the day after because it hurt too much to walk. They remember when they went to Sarah’s to get ready for the first seventh-grade dance and how the teachers made them stop grinding with Mike and Travis. How Emma plucked her eyebrows too much and looked surprised all the time. How there’s nothing to do late at night but at least now they can drive to Wilbur’s for Pringles and cookie dough.

Sarah does things with boys because they are her friends and she thinks it would be rude to say no. Emma tells her this is fucked up. Sarah says, Yeah, but it’s never as simple as just saying no. Their mothers feel uneasy when the girls leave the house at night on the weekends. We wish you would say no, their mothers tell them. The girls avoid their fathers because it is weird to hug them now, knowing all that they shouldn’t. They go to Wal-Mart after the movies and push each other around the store in shopping carts and are yelled at by security. They steal stickers and lip gloss and twenty-cent Dots candy. Everyone is looking at them all the time and it’s exhausting. Allie says, Thank God we’re young, otherwise this would be terrifying. They drive the back roads with the windows down and the summer air rushing in with the cicadas and the sweet cloying smell of manure past the cow pastures and crumbling barns whose frames are filled with a blackness thicker than the night’s. Tree branches reach out, heavy with green, and the stone walls have disappeared beneath aggressive ferns. I could write the summer night, says Allie, and I would write it with cars and joints and beer and boys, write it with my eyeliner and my nail polish scratched on the page. I would write it with late night swims in my pool, says Sarah, and with snacks made in my dark kitchen and with stopping by the side of the road to pee. I would write it with us, says Emma. They all agree that this is best.

The summer has been lonely. They move apart in small ways but by the end it has added up. There is a time when Emma tries to throw herself out of the car her father is driving. He locks the doors. What do you think I’m going to do? he asks. She looks at him. I don’t know, she says. Allie vacuums the living room carpet and her stepmother is upset because she missed spots and so Allie doesn’t vacuum the next time and her stepmother tells her she is lazy and her perfume is too strong. Sarah is overlooked for the sister on either side of her. Allie and Sarah both think Emma is mean to her parents. Emma thinks Allie and Sarah can’t understand because they don’t live with her parents. Jake likes Emma but she can tell he doesn’t want to show it when he is around his friends and Emma does the same around Allie. Allie sleeps with Zeb more often and with another kid named Dan and with a girl named Lucy until Lucy gets sent back to California for drugs.

This is the summer Jake finds Brandon Valance by the side of the road with his truck on top of him. This is the summer that Allie’s house is so hot they sleep on the trampoline more often than ever, and tracing the stars with their fingers they show each other all the ways they are connected. Emma cuts pictures and poems from magazines and collages her walls, looking at them critically as if a boy she likes is in her room. She wonders if he would think this stuff is cool. She tells Allie and Sarah about doing shrooms with her half brother when she visited him at college last spring but she is lying just to be cool and this is obvious to all of them. The popular girls have become more popular, their waists tinier, skin clearer. Tonight Emma has straightened her hair but it’s already beginning to frizz in a halo around the crown of her head. It’s so hot her jeans are damp where her thighs rub together.

The girls drive through the center of Powder Mill. Eleven at night and the town looks abandoned. The orange caution light blinks despondently to the empty intersection. Beautiful dark. Mass of stars. Clear air. Allie’s backpack is full of things they never go to a party without: mirror, flashlight, Swiss Army knife, lighter, water, alcohol, weed, rolling papers, pipe, cigarettes, cell phone, Band-Aids, Blistex, tissues, Tampax, dry socks, extra batteries. They exit the car into the humid night and smoke cigarettes and wait for the boys to come get them.

 

V

If this is what falling in love feels like then none of them want it. It hurts too much for the price they are paying. Jake comes down with Travis in his truck and the girls pile in the bed. Emma sits in the middle of an old tire and they laugh and watch the sky blur through the branches above. Country music pours out of the cab as the truck bumps hard through the ruts in the abandoned logging track. Jake is driving fast to scare them and they almost tip sideways into a ditch but they make it up to the party where they see by the light of the bonfire that everyone is already there. Three kegs are in the back of Mike’s truck and Dave and Joe are playing Beirut against Bobby March and Dylan Stanton but they keep losing the ping-pong ball and someone bumps into the table, knocking over cups of beer. Boys lean against trucks with their arms around girls and the freshmen stand in clumps laughing too loudly. Even the dangerous boys are here, the boys who are written about in the local police logs for having coke in their cars at traffic stops and the guys who never graduated but stuck around to sell drugs to the younger kids. Chevy Bouchard has just finished his sentence for possession of a controlled substance but he is already wasted and standing on the porch. Fuck you! he is yelling to Tobey Hames. It’s intimidating to walk into this, as if they suddenly don’t recognize anyone, all these people they’ve known since kindergarten are drunk or high or both and talking about shit and shit and more shit.

Let’s get wasted, says Allie. Agreed, says Emma and Sarah passes the bottle of Parrot Bay and Diet Coke around their triangle. Whatcha drinkin? asks Jake leering at them. Have some of this, he says and he hands them straight tequila. Emma takes the biggest gulp so that it feels good when Jake slides up next to her and asks her how she’s been. Fine, she tells him. Hangin in there, ya know. Yup, he says, Sure do. He passes her the bottle again and she feels Allie looking this time so she swallows even more. Go easy, says Sarah, I’m gonna be the one taking care of you. That won’t happen, says Emma. 

In the small hunting cabin there is a generator and a flood lamp set up. The Tremont boys are on the couches rolling on MDMA. The girls sit down next to them and it’s entertaining for a while to listen to the boys tell them how wonderful and fantastic life is. Jessica comes in with some whippets and everyone does a few hits. Turning their heads takes five million hours and voices sound like molasses. It’s hysterical, everyone is hysterically laughing, the boys on molly especially and people are writhing on the dirty floor it’s so effing funny but then Austin has a mini freak-out and that brings people back down until they’re all hiccupping softly. Someone offers salvia and Sarah tries it. For five minutes she speaks nothing but gibberish and drools and yells loudly and falls down when she tries to stand up and then she starts crying a little. Emma can tell people are kind of feeling weird about it so she convinces Sarah to follow her outside where they find a quiet place at the edge of the field. They sit on the tailgate of Mike’s 4Runner and Emma rubs Sarah’s back while she talks through it.

It felt like . . . it felt like everything was being ripped away from me and this reality . . . this reality was just a bleeding chunk of meat and I was wrapped up in it and I completely forgot myself and that I even smoked salvia. I just thought this is how things are and I just thought that I would rather be dead. Oh it was so bad. Here, drink, says Emma.

By the time they go back they are both more than buzzed but not yet sloppy, which they agree is right where they want to stay so they don’t do anything else stupid, but now they can’t find Allie and after a while they become sidetracked by the Beirut game. They play against Jake and Mike who beat them, but it’s close and the girls feel the stares of the guys who are standing around watching. Jake and Mike start mooning the girls as a distraction so Emma and Sarah bend down low and their tits almost fall out but they still don’t win. They sit on the porch railing and Travis, Mike, and Joe ask them about Allie. She let Pat put it up the butt, didn’t she? Right in the pooper, says Travis. The girls laugh. I can’t say, says Emma. She didn’t tell me. That’s a lie, says Mike. You know. It’s yes, isn’t it? Allie let Pat fuck her in the ass. Emma wants to explain that it wasn’t so much of a let situation, but she giggles and pinches Sarah’s shoulder. Come on, says Joe. Just say yes. We know it happened. Sarah shakes her head, No, but Emma nods consent and then the boys begin to yell, I knew it! Holy shit! Oh Emma, says Sarah, really? I mean, says Emma, it’s not as if they didn’t know. This is bad, says Sarah. I know, says Emma watching Jake’s back as he walks out to his truck. Where is Allie anyway?

The stars whirl overhead and in the field the grass is cold and damp with dew. They are running, running through the grass and stumbling over the dips in the ground. They are high and drunk and yell loudly because no one can hear them. They crash into each other and move apart again and chase each other in circles. They lie down and the grass swallows them. The crickets jump over their heads, dark little blurs in the night, and the stars are shining fiercely above.

 

VI

The girls find each other in Sage Park. They look hungover. Dark-circled eyes shaded behind sunglasses and hair greasy and matted from the night before. It is a gorgeous day—light breeze, blue sky, maybe eighty degrees. Emma feels guilty because of what she told the boys about Allie last night and because she ended up going home with Mike and doing things she wishes she hadn’t. The girls pull three chairs close together. What’s up? says Emma to Allie. We couldn’t find you.

I know, says Allie. I was in Pat’s van with him and Dan Miller.

Emma watches a bee moving sluggishly through the thick surrounding silence.

Doing what, exactly, in Pat’s van with him and Dan Miller? asks Sarah.

Allie sighs. Well, you two went off somewhere together and I stayed and drank more and the boys convinced me that taking molly would be a good idea . . . or, I mean Pat told me it would be, not that that’s a reason to do it. But I did.

Allie! says Emma.

I know. So when it started working I was still on the couch and Pat was rubbing my back and telling me how beautiful I am and I started to get into it a little. So then he tells me we should go out to his van and inside on the floor he has blankets and sleeping bags because he’s taken out the seats. And then . . . he starts making out with me, which isn’t so bad. I kind of wanted to do it anyway, even if I hadn’t been rolling. We did that for a while and it felt really nice but then he puts his hand down my pants and it kind of hurts and then the door opens . . . and it was just Dan, or that’s how I thought of it at the time because I was so fucked up. Like, oh, it’s okay. Just Dan coming to say hi, I guess.

Was he? asks Sarah.

Was he what?

Was he just saying hello?

Not exactly . . . I think he started watching me and Pat for a bit but you know how when you’re wicked drunk sometimes something starts happening but you have no idea when and you’re kind of suddenly just in the middle of it? So, okay. So the next thing is Dan’s dick is in my mouth and Pat’s still got his fingers inside me and then we’re all having sex and I just couldn’t really do anything to stop it . . . I mean, it wasn’t ever two at once or anything, but Pat would be doing it from behind while I’m blowing Dan and then they switch or I was on top of one and the other kisses me or whatever . . .

Emma and Sarah are both looking at the ground. For how long? asks Emma.

For a while, because on molly you’re up for like four hours.

Aren’t you sore?

Yeah, kind of.

How’d you get home?

Jake drove me and then took me to get my car this morning.

Damn, says Emma and she hesitates before asking, So . . . do you feel okay?

No. I mean . . . I just know that I didn’t want to do it and it’s awful because people definitely heard. Or if they didn’t hear it last night, then they’ll hear about it today and I feel like . . . just raw and dried out and exhausted. I don’t want to think about it anymore, but I wanted to tell you because it’s too much to keep quiet about.

This is Allie, the girl whose Christmas tree they hike miles into the woods—just the three of them—to chop down and who insists the strings go popcorn-cranberry-cranberry-popcorn, who calls down comforters puffs, who thought ketchup was made from potatoes until she was fourteen, who lies on her bed with them while they read their own poems, poems each can date for the other. Allie, the girl whose trampoline they sit on for hours, talking and connecting the bright white stars above. No, says Emma. We’re glad you told us. She glances at Sarah, who nods, but now Emma doesn’t know what else there is to say because this will be what they remember about the summer.

IN THE MATTER OF MENDENHALL

The mailman’s late again. The honey slides

must be catching up with him. Aurora

borealis, the icy skies at night.

He knows the Pocahontas he adores

these days will change, move, marry. She’ll go by

another name. He dreams from door to door,

thinks of lists and codes he couldn’t turn to lore,

the messenger myths strung across the sky.

Above the desk, my charts of yearly thoughts,

the zodiac turned to Bloom. I sit and smoke,

wonder if he’ll lose his hold on the route.

It rains, and rusts my bike and rail and lock.

How lazy I’ve become, now that I’ve got

neither neighbor’s knock nor letter’s luck.

SAFETY

Nicholle, my newly minted serious girlfriend, hails from southern Alabama. The first time I meet her family, her brother, Dub, takes me to his swimming hole. Just before we splash in the muddy river he slaps my back and says, “Watch fer moccasins and snappers.”  Sure enough, we’re neck deep under the hazy summer sky when I spot a black snake enter the water. I have no idea what kind it is, and I quickly lose sight of it. Dub, this crazy bastard, is unaffected by my update. I don’t want to be scared, but I’ve reached my breaking point, and hurdle myself toward the bank. There’s a ways to go and every water ripple grows a tail and fangs. Behind me I hear Dub laughing at my terror.

When it’s all done and I sit at the dinner table with Nicholle, Dub, and her parents, I wonder if there’s anything in my northern New Mexico upbringing that would scare Dub, and although I search hard, all I recall is a harmless bluegill fish attached to my pinky when I’m eight. I look across the table at Nicholle’s mother, a cheerful, plump lady who, if I unfocus my eyes enough, could be Nicholle in thirty years. Her father smiles approvingly at me, so at least I have that going. I’m nervous as hell, but I still feel for Nicholle’s thin legs underneath the table. She swats me away.

Dub scares me a little. His hair is cut at varied lengths and there appears to be a knife scar across his cheek. After dinner, he asks me if I’ve ever been waterboarded. I tell him no, and he says he hasn’t either.

“But,” he says, “I beat up a homeless guy. Dumbass didn’t even fight back, just laid there.”

“Thanks for that, Dub.”

“I’ve seen some shit,” he says. He’s out of high school, probably eighteen or so, but has an enthusiasm and weakness of intellect that makes eighteen hard to swallow. “Nicholle don’t know this, but I can count cards. I act broke, but there’s ten thou in my room. Swear.”

“Okay,” I say while fingering my chin, “cool.”

I have no idea why I say cool, can’t think of anything else, and even Dub looks at me curiously.

“You count cards?” he asks.

Actually, I do, but I’m not interested in where the conversation will go or what I’ll be invited to do. “You mean like gambling?” I say.

“Jesus,” he says laughing. He shakes his head. “Gambling.”

What Dub doesn’t know, and what I never plan on telling Nicholle, is that I do gamble. It’s not bad: local games with friends. I bring what I can lose and that’s it.

I do have the bad type of secrets. At the top of the list is a night in Los Alamos, New Mexico, just after dusk. I was late to a no-limit game across town, and I decided to cut through Woodmen Pointe subdivision.  I was up to forty miles per hour on a straightaway near the end of a row of tan stucco homes.   I never saw the girl scatter from the shadows, never heard her over the radio. I only felt the bump of her body, like running over a small dog.  And before I could think about anything, the Jeep stopped, my fingers strangled the wheel. I closed my eyes.  For a weightless moment only sound:  Tom Petty, the idling four-cylinder, a slight breeze whistling the aspen.  When I opened my eyes, no one was outside to scream and rush forward and finger me. No cars approached the other way. There was just a motionless child in my rearview mirror basking in the filtered red brake light.  She wore torn pink sweatpants, and the soles of her tiny shoes were brand-new white.  I saw my arm reach out and turn off the radio, then put the Jeep into first. My eyes swung back to the rearview mirror just in time to see her legs jolt once, then calm. Was she dead or just now dying? I drove away. I could still see her through the suffocating air, now quiet as a napping child.

Later that night I huddled in my shower replaying images of the jolting pink legs.  I tried to convince myself that she’d live, that a doctor would find her, that she’d suffer a little—a lifelong limp perhaps—and there would be a recovery, but her death was on the news and in the paper the next morning.  It was a hot story in Los Alamos for two weeks until the wildfires took over.  Even the big station in Albuquerque carried it.  On the telecast the anchors reported the event and begged people to call in with any information on the assailant.  They showed her family huddled on their front yard in front of microphones, their faces falling apart.

I don’t know where my belief in a just universe comes from, but it’s there, and one day, be it snake or other ailment, I know my time will come. I can’t get it out of my head. The worst part is that it’s a waiting game, and so I wait and feel the possibility of justice hover over me, pausing until the time is right.

 

The night I call Nicholle’s father to ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage he cries. Gravel dances in his throat. “I couldn’t be happier,” he says. “I’ll let you talk to Karen.”  There’s silence while he passes the phone, but his voice comes through again. “Two things, son.”  It’s the first time he’s called me son. “One. I’ll only loan you money if Nicholle asks. Two. If you don’t have a gun, get one.”  A pause. I smile. “Three. You’re a Tide fan when you visit. Four. I’ll give you a nickname which you probably won’t like. Just smile. Five. We’ve loved you for a while now. Good luck.”

After I ask Nicholle to marry me under a flowering dogwood, she makes me call Dub.

“Know where I been?” Dub says after telling me good job on the proposal. I tell him no, I don’t know where he’s been. “Riverboats man. Rivers are international waters. No rules, buddy. State, government, can’t touch ’em.”

“Okay,” I say.

“Should get married on a riverboat. There’s one called the Gypsy.”

“We’ll consider it, Dub.”

“Love you, man,” he says like he means it.

I pass the phone to Nicholle, who’s all smiles. “The Gypsy?” she says while I shake my head next to her. She gives me a look. It means that Dub is off-limits.

 

During our engagement Nicholle and I pick up books about marriage. We open our favorite one, The Questions You Should Ask Before “I Do,” whenever we Sunday-drive from Knoxville, where we both work. I learn that Nicholle would never adopt, thinks sex three times a week is enough, hates cats, wants to visit Mongolia (“Just to say I’ve been”), doesn’t mind if I have to travel for work, dreams of performing on Broadway if she could sing, is scared of getting her mother’s cheeks, and doesn’t like it when I say, “Ya know what I’m saying?” when trying to prove a point.

She learns a lot about me as well, at least the stuff I want her to know, but her face goes to stone when I tell her my number one pet peeve is when people praise God only for the good things in life. “If God is so great,” I say, “what the hell is up with cancer and dropped touchdown passes?  No one points to the sky when a pass slips through their fingers.”  We go at it pretty good when I think: “If you’re smart, you’ll never say these things again,” but I know I will. All this learning about each other is fine, but the great stuff comes out when we sit in a tan stucco courtyard on our honeymoon in Savannah. We are waiting for our food, sipping on red wine when Nicholle asks me the worst thing I’ve ever considered doing to someone else, even if it was just for a split second. I consider taking my hit-and-run and forming a hypothetical, just to see the reaction, but all that comes to me is the girl’s spotless white shoes. I feel my stomach clench and push the image away. I search my mental catalogue for relief, and it doesn’t take me long to sift through the feeble mock threats and momentary revenge wishes to a wooded mountainside near my childhood town.

I was twelve, cutting down dead white pine with my father in the backcountry. I took a break, leaning against the old red Dodge truck, and in a bizarre mental pulse I thought of taking the chain saw and hacking my father. I imagined the roaring saw, the blood and limbs mixing with the sawdust, the dumbfounded look in his eyes before the spinning hot teeth bit. Even in that moment I remember being ashamed and frightened of my own psychological capacity.

Now in the Italian restaurant courtyard, I hold the salt shaker in my hand and avoid Nicholle’s brown eyes. I don’t know if the words have come out right. Can those words come out right?  “It’s crazy,” I say. I feel heavy and place my hands in my lap. “I don’t know what I’m saying. Ya know what I’m saying?” I steal a glance. She’s wearing my favorite sundress, a white number with small red and yellow flowers. She’s tan and has her hair pulled back. There’s a large party in the courtyard clinking wineglasses and talking over one another. We’re all visitors.

“Stealing a baby,” Nicholle says. “I don’t know where it comes from. But there it is. I’d planned names, escape routes from the hospital, everything. I didn’t care if it looked like me. I even thought it might be easier to take a year-old, not a newborn. They’d be eating solids.”

The food arrives. I cut the veal with my knife. I take another bite and watch Nicholle move her bare arms as she negotiates her utensils into her pasta, then grabs for her wineglass and gulps. We should laugh. I think of laughing.

“So,” I say. “I’m glad we’re the normal ones.”

 

We move into a nice rolling subdivision in West Knoxville called Hawks Landing. Lo and behold, about a month into our stay two hawks make their nest in a giant ponderosa in our front yard. The place is spacious and we have privacy on almost an acre. The neighbors are fine, but there’s a guy around the corner who lets his dog shit in our yard. One Sunday morning, as I trim the flowering bushes in the front, he comes around with the dog and waves friendly to me before the dog scampers ten feet onto the grass and does his business. I don’t have the balls to say anything. I’m out-of-shape thin and believe there’s a hovering fistfight in every confrontation. He’s a big guy, brick shoulders, looks like he wouldn’t mind a fight, win or lose. Sometimes I see both him and the dog rolling around on his front yard when I come home from work. I stay clear. Besides that, life is great. Nicholle and I join a co-ed softball league, help clean up the local park, and make church about a third of the time. I like the routine. We break it up just enough to keep everything interesting. Nicholle steals four hundred dollars’ worth of tile from a local hardware store. Just walks out. It’s in our bathroom on a diagonal. I lie to my boss most days about where I am, the hours I put in, but I work hard enough that he never questions me. I’m a Tennessee fan now, but Nicholle is Alabama all the way, so we have one of those stupid house-divided license plates, half orange, half crimson. We have lots of friends and a few enemies, but it’s a healthy proportion.

Dub calls one night and talks to Nicholle for an hour. This is not normal.

“He needs money,” Nicholle says. My head is already in my hands. “Five thousand.” We don’t have two thousand dollars. “He’ll pay us back. He says he’ll pay us back. I know what you’re going to say. He wouldn’t ask unless he needed it.” I’m not going to say a thing. “He’s desperate and we can cash bonds if we have to. Say something. We need to be together on this.”

She’s near tears. It’s breaking her heart. She knows we’ll never see a penny back, knows we can’t afford it, knows I despise her for asking, and yet, here she is. It’s her brother. I tell her I want him to drive up so I can see him face to face when I hand him the check. Everyone agrees, but two weeks later Nicholle puts the money in the mail and talks to me about the price of gasoline.   

 

Nicholle and I think we’ll get pregnant right away. We’re both healthy, but after six months she’s still not pregnant. We lie to the doctors, tell them it’s been a year, but they say nothing’s wrong. Nicholle and I fight and stress, and making love morphs into an exercise of hopelessness over the next two years. I change jobs and become a rep in a pharmaceutical company selling erectile dysfunction drugs. The money is good, but I’m on the road every other week. I’m outside a Taco Bell in Jacksonville when Nicholle calls me. I shift the greasy bag to my right hand and answer the phone.

“You’re going to be a father,” she says.

“Okay,” I say. “Really?”

She loses it and I want to, but I can’t cry. Of all things, I imagine the drive home from the hospital with our newborn child in the backseat. I think of all of the new drivers, the drunk drivers, the red-light racers.

“We need a car seat,” I say.

“I love you,” Nicholle says through the sniffles.

I love her too, but I say, “Does this mean we don’t have to steal a baby?”

Four weeks later I’m outside the VA hospital in Charlotte when she lets me know the pregnancy is ectopic. It’s July, and dust swirls in the empty sky. I think of our growing child in Nicholle’s right fallopian tube, budding bigger and bigger, slowly killing my wife, but she says the doctors are going to take care of everything the next day, and they do. I fly home and sit in our living room, Nicholle’s head in my lap as she rubs at her legs. There’s nothing I can say, so we’re mostly quiet.

She says, “We have to wait three months.”

The ceiling fan spins above us, and Nicholle’s hair brushes at my legs. I study her body from her head down to her hips and bent knees and tucked feet. Very slowly, she uncoils. She hasn’t told her parents yet, but as she heads upstairs and closes our bedroom door I know she’s going for the phone. I hear her muffled voice through the ceiling. She’s not crying yet. There’s nothing her mother can do from that distance, but there’s a safety in that bond that I’ll never be able to join. The fan does little to help with the thick humidity. I wonder, is all of this part of my penance?  A life for a life?  Am I even with the universe?  The pain of losing something sight unseen seems like an easy sentence. Is this just the beginning?  I see the Los Alamos girl curled up like an embryo. My heart was exploding and my hands pounded as they shifted the Jeep into first gear and released the clutch. I pressed the gas. I named the girl long ago, and tonight I hear it in my ears: Courtney. It’s not the name said in the television reports in the aftermath, but I don’t care. I haven’t met a Courtney since. She’s the only one.

 

In early September, just as we find our voices again, we watch television clips from New York City of people jumping from the buildings. I’ve never considered choosing between flame and gravity, and later, when the photos come out in magazines showing the bodies falling to their deaths, I am certain gravity would be the answer if given the choice.

After another miscarriage, Nicholle becomes pregnant. She’s seven months along, a big, beautiful belly with a dark line bisecting her bulge. We ride in a bus. I can’t stop touching her. Across from us sit four men that resemble the plane hijackers. I’m educated. Logically, I know these aren’t terrorists. They ride the public bus downtown. They’re happy and joking with one another. They speak a mix of English and something else. But one of them looks over at us, looks at Nicholle, at her belly, and stares. His brown face goes slack, his entire countenance trancelike. Am I due?  Will this be it?  The man will make a move toward us. His friends will hold me down while he struggles with Nicholle. I may survive this attack, alone. When that image passes I imagine him flying a plane, a little single-prop Cessna over our neighborhood. The hawks are up and circling high in the sky. He brings the plane into a dive, tears up the birds, heads straight for our shingled roof, but before I can complete the daydream, Nicholle reaches for my clenched hand, unfolds it, and intertwines hers. The man stares unflinchingly.

“Soon,” Nicholle says to the man, tilting her chin up. “Two months left.”  It takes a second for him to realize that she has spoken to him. The man breaks his stare. “Soon,” Nicholle repeats.

The four of them become quiet. The man taps his brown shirt above his heart, taps his forehead, and circles his hand toward us. “Girl,” he says.

 

The magnolias I planted bloom large white blossoms. I stare at them with a cup of coffee one Saturday morning when the neighborhood jackass brings his retriever by. Nicholle’s parents are in town, and her father stands next to me as the dog unloads one on our driveway. I’m near my limit with no plan. He gives me enough time to say something, and when I don’t he asks, “How often, Slim?”

“I only see them on the weekends,” I say.

“That’s not what I asked,” he says and looks at me as if I’m a whiny child.

Later in the week Nicholle’s dad tells me the jerk works the mid-shift, that he must walk the dog when he gets home. I don’t ask how he knows this. He steps into the den and calls someone on his cell phone. When he returns he says, “You’ll have to help.”  He asks me to wait in the parking lot of the store, and comes out with a plastic bottle of antifreeze. Sparks fly around me, and before he gets in the car, I assign the guilt to him: his idea, his purchase. I can’t take on this one as well. I’ve decided I won’t say no as long as he pours it into the dog bowl. Nicholle’s father sits with a heavy exhale.

“Dub’s done this a couple times,” he says. “Says to mix in a little vinegar, helps it go down.”

“Vinegar?”

“That’s what he says. He sends his love. Wanted me to tell you.”

 

The doctor makes me grab a leg before he tells Nicholle to start pushing. Emma arrives early, only three pounds, two ounces. This is what family means. Three days later we come home. No man could endure Nicholle’s schedule of no-sleep, all-go patience. Emma has my blue eyes, and even though many children are born with blue eyes, hers are my blue. I see them under the oxygen mask she has to wear to keep her lungs full.

Eight weeks later Emma has some neck control. I’ve just returned from Lexington. She rests on my chest when I get a call.

“Kevin has died,” Uncle Norv says.

Kevin, my cousin, died while trying to escape Paddy’s Pub in Bali. After the call, I do a little research until I know the scene inside the pub: a small explosion flashed out of a backpack amidst the music and drinks and sweat. Kevin joined the frantic swarm into the warm night only to be greeted by a white Mitsubishi van loaded with explosives. It left a crater more than a meter deep. Later, as I consider the incident, I like to rewind to a minute before the backpack detonation; where, in his mid-twenties, Kevin swayed and bounced to the band in pure bliss; where, the dream-like Bali became real under a mix of alcohol and moonlight; where, for Kevin, time slowed just enough to pause.

I consider the end often. I always have after the hit-and-run. I tell Nicholle that if we played the percentages I’d go before her, most likely some kind of cancer. It’s probably already started somewhere deep inside my slippery body. Sometimes I worry Nicholle might go first. When she’s late getting home from a mom’s night out, my mind allows about a thirty-minute cushion, and then begins the murmurs of what-ifs. The whole scene flashes by: the dreaded call—auto accident, funeral, insurance money, my baby girl growing, me dating or not, the guilt of either, moving (would I have to move? yes, definitely), different career, Emma’s wedding—but then the garage door grumbles open and Nicholle saunters in because, in the end, there’s absolutely nothing wrong.

 

I’m back on the road now: a week away every other month. When I’m gone I call home at 6:30 their time every night. Emma has just finished her bath and Nicholle puts the phone up to her ear so she can hear my voice. Emma’s only eight months old and already she plays with her first steps.

Whenever I’m in Memphis I play cards a couple blocks off the strip in a brick basement where there’s a password. It’s a thrill. I know most of the participants. We aren’t thugs. When we lose money it hurts. We have polo shirts and mortgages. This time I have a flush and a story starts up around the table about a guy who had his dick put in a vise. He owed money to the wrong people, the regular story. There’s laughter. I stare at my spades, organized and lethal. I reach for chips.

“Named Dub,” says Nick, the organizer of the game.

“Dub?” someone says. “Deserved it.”

Jordan, a baker with nervous hands, asks if you could die from that—a dick in a vise.

A new guy, Alec, quiets everyone with his monotone. “Yes,” he says. “If you leave ’em there, eventually, they die of hunger.”

How many Dubs can there be?  I think of what I’ll say to Nicholle. What do I ask?  Water moccasin Dub, snapping turtle Dub. I see him laughing in the muddy water as I dry off on the bank, still unable to quiet my knees. I wait until the next day. It’s 7 p.m. I’ve whispered to Emma, and Nicholle explains how she’s considering going back to work, just part time, over the summer. She’s having trouble losing the last ten pounds of pregnancy weight.

“When’s Dub going to come visit his niece?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she says. “He’s not coming with money.”

 

Dub rolls his truck eight times on a Monday morning at 3 a.m. He’s drunk and his face and chest are mashed up good. Nicholle’s parents call. Her mother asks for our prayers. We pray. It’s close for a few hours, but Dub pulls through. Nicholle’s mother praises God and His mercy and His comfort. It’s all she talks about. Dub drank a bottle of Jack and got behind the wheel. He forgot to put his seat belt on, was ejected from the rolling vehicle, and landed on his back, his eyes looking up at dizzying stars. I want to ask Nicholle’s mother if buckling in is the Devil’s work, but I never will.

Two months later, Dub shows up at the house one evening twenty pounds lighter, hands shaking. He smells like boiled cabbage and urine. He says he’s been in the same clothes for a week, sleeping during the day, driving at night. He’s out of money and in trouble. Says it’s the kind of trouble you don’t wake up from.

“Got to stay out of ’Bama,” he says.

Before I can wrap my head around the situation, Nicholle has invited him in, and shown him to the guest room. He showers upstairs while Nicholle and I cuss and stomp. Before the water turns off we’ve come to a compromise. He has two weeks. After that, he’s on his own. I know Nicholle won’t kick him out at the deadline, but it’s something.

 

A month later I make the morning hospital rounds in Little Rock. I’m not supposed to leave until the following day, but I think of changing my flight to get back to the girls and Dub that night. I hustle back to the hotel. I pick up the ringing hotel receiver just before I leave for the airport. It’s Nicholle’s voice, nervous and quick. She says there are two men, a tall one at the front door, the other standing at the side of the house. She’s ignored them, but the man at the front door had stopped knocking and peers into the long, narrow window to the left of the door. Emma sleeps.

“Am I crazy?” she asks.

“Just wait a minute,” I say. “Deep breaths. Are they in uniform?”

“No,” she says. “Why?  Did you schedule something?” But she doesn’t let me answer. “Because it’s been far too long, they’ve been here five minutes.” She tells me that she can see the one at the front door glancing around, not into the house, but around and at the other houses in the neighborhood. I hear Dub in the background.

“Put Dub on.” I wait for his voice and the pause stretches. I force myself to breathe.

“There’s some shit,” he says. “Damn. Damn. Nothin’s gunna happen, man. Trust me.”

“You son of a bitch. Handle this, Dub.” There’s no reply.

“Hello?” It’s Nicholle. “The one on the side moved into the backyard,” she says. I picture the spacious yard, the towering ponderosa and medium dogwoods. It is 3:15 my time, 4:15 there. “Dub left the damn truck in the driveway. Listen to me. Something’s not right here.”

I stand in the small hotel room, packed suitcase at my feet. “Go get Emma,” I say.

Nicholle breathes heavy into the phone and she says, “My God.” I trace her path in my head, down the long second-floor hallway, through the white door into the baby’s yellow bedroom with pink block letters above the crib: emma.

“I’m back in our room. Emma’s . . . They’re in—,” she says. “The other one is on the back porch and the man at the front door, he’s knocking again.”

“Lock the door and call 9-1-1,” I say. “Do it now.”

“Don’t hang up, damn you.”

“I don’t hear Emma.”

“She’s here.”

“Where’s Dub?”

“He’s down there. They’re screaming.”

It was twenty bucks a month for the alarm whose wires probably dangled disconnected. I picture its white box under the stairs. Then the blue safe under our bed.

“Get the gun,” I say.

“I’m putting the phone on the bed.”  Over the line I can hear Emma’s labored breathing. It sounds like she’s trying to put the receiver in her mouth. She was born at thirty weeks, the size of my forearm.

“I have it,” Nicholle says. “Okay, I have it.”  A pause. “They’re fighting. God, they’re fighting.”

“Like we practiced. Put the magazine in. It should have rounds in it.”

“Crashing downstairs.”

“Pull the hammer back,” I say.

“What?  What’s the hammer?”

“I mean the slide. Shit, the slide. We’ve practiced this. The top part, throw the slide back.”

“It’s sticking. On the stairs now.”  She whispers. “Up the stairs.”

“Yell out to them, ‘I have a gun.’” She does. “And again,” I say. She says it again. “And I will shoot you.”  I hear her say it, and she says, “Motherfuckers.”  Emma cries.

“It’s sticking,” is all she says to me.

“Do you remember?”

“Yes,” she says. “I know what to do but it’s sticking.”  Her pitch rises. No one is on their way to them.

“Got it,” Nicholle says. Then, “They’re talking on the stairs.” And her voice lowers even more. “They said, ‘Dub.’ My God, they know us.”

“Say it again.”

“What?”

“The gun,” I say.

“I’ve got a gun,” she yells.

“If they open the door you shoot until the gun stops firing and then load the next magazine.”

She must hear the finality in my voice because she says, “No.”  I hear it right before I hang up and dial 9-1-1. I sling information as fast as I can to the operator, and picture the safety on the gun Nicholle holds, turned down, the red dot hidden. My sight goes wavy, the ceiling lowers on me as I think of the locked trigger. I hang up, call home and the metallic tone pulses off and on until the answering machine engages. It’s her slow morning voice: “You’ve reached Nicholle and Keith Bailey,” and my voice in the background, “and Emma,”—she’s laughing—“We’re not in right now, but please leave a message and we’ll get back with you. Thank you.”  I listen to the entire thing and hang up and call back. She won’t be able to hear me, no matter what I say into the phone. When I get the message again, I hang up immediately and call back. This time I let the whole message play and sit with the phone in my hand, a beam of light from the hotel window now in my eyes. I close them. The silence through the line is muffled. It’s recording me listening, and I think there’s a chance, if I’m loud enough, Nicholle might be able to pick up one word, through the drywall and beams and carpet, past Dub’s body, through the locked bedroom door, past the men with outstretched arms.

I breathe and scream, “Safety,” over and over and over, until there are no more words, just a machine recording my empty lungs.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Story THIS CODY

My husband says the dam is strong. He says we have nothing to worry about. He gives me a look so that I will go back to knitting the world’s most unfortunate scarf, and he can finish reading his novel in peace. But I can’t help thinking how far we are from town, how all our searching for quiet, our desire for another kind of life, has left us alone out here in the shadow of the dam—exposed. I try not to think about it. I try to get lost in our days. We feed the chickens. We weed the garden. We carry our water from the creek, the one that used to be a river deep enough to sink a truck, the one the dam has choked to a trickle. If you stand in the creek bed, ankle-deep, you can see it in the distance, the concrete bowl of the dam, water sloshing over its lip.

I have dreams about it. They all start the same way. We wake to water two inches deep and the dogs whining, backed into their corners. All night we sweep the water out, but by morning, we’re wading waist-deep in the cold, fishless shallows, filling our buckets.

I stop telling Brian about the dreams after he throws down his novel and slams the bedroom door. “The dam is fine,” he yells from the other side of the wall. “You’re the one who’s cracking.”

Some days I don’t recognize him. He’s grown out his beard, and the paunch I so lovingly stroked is now all muscle, his abdominals like flat stones stacked atop one another. I’m different, too. Our dogs, two purebred Heelers Brian insisted we buy to go with our new life, won’t come when I call. The chickens peck my hand when I reach for the eggs. The garden dies all at once, overnight. Last night, I found a scorpion on my pillow, his dancer’s arms poised to strike. Sometimes I think this place is trying to get rid of me, and I wonder if Brian wouldn’t be better off. Sometimes I can’t remember why we came here, what we hoped it would fix. In the dream, the dam is splintering down the middle, a tiny fissure that widens into a crack and then a crevice and then a fault through which the river pours as if it is willful, as if it knows the way back to the beginning.

That’s not true. What I said before about not remembering why we came here. I remember, and so does he, but we pretend there wasn’t a place before here. We never lived in the city. We never ate at Spiro’s or took the red line to the aquarium on free day. We never had a son and then lost him.

When the weather is mild, like tonight, we sit on the porch while the stars blink on. Out here, they’re so bright they hardly seem real. Sometimes Brian plays his harmonica, and sometimes we just listen to the woods. It seems so much of marriage amounts to this—two people alone together in the dark. In the distance, the dogs are leaping to bite the air, and what I want is for someone else to tell Brian I’m sorry because I can’t do it. Sometimes I feel the words rising in my chest, but when I open my mouth, there is only my breath going out. So I say it in other ways. I say it when I’m weeding the garden that I hate and feeding the chickens that I hate. I say it just by waking in this place that is not my home.

Our nearest neighbor is an old man we sometimes see on the road driving his truck back up the hill as we are coming down. He lives a half-hour drive away through dense woods and across a narrow bridge. You have to get out and walk because the bridge is too rickety to drive on. Last week, from the driver’s seat, Brian said, “A man lives way out here, he probably wants to be left alone.” So he waited in the truck, and I walked across the bridge by myself, bearing a caved-in pie. The thing is, I knew he was in there. I could hear the floorboards creaking. I saw the curtain move. But he never answered the door. I knocked and knocked and then finally set the pie on the porch and walked back across the bridge to where my husband was waiting.

“How’d it go?” he asked.

“Good,” I lied. “His name is Cody, too.”

Brian stiffened in his seat. He turned slowly to look at me. I could see the thoughts coming off his face in waves. He wanted to say something, to accuse me of lying, but who would lie about something like that? He opened his mouth and then closed it again. Finally, he shook his head and turned back to the steering wheel. What I wanted, I know now, was just to say our son’s name out loud. The crisp “c” and the rolling “o” and the slight flick of the tongue for the “dy.”

Brian put the truck in gear and we drove back through the woods, silent as ever. But later, on the porch, the dogs kicked in their sleep. The stars, too close, were baring their teeth. Somewhere in the distance I knew the dam was there.

“You’re telling the truth,” Brian asked from his rocker, “about the man? His name?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s strange, isn’t it?”

I have always been a good liar. Even when I was a child, my mother could never tell. You have to commit, is the thing. You have to believe it. On the day I lost our son, I told three lies. First, I said he had only been missing for fifteen minutes, when it was really more like an hour. Fifteen minutes still sounded hopeful, I thought. On the phone, Brian wasn’t yet concerned. Later is when he wouldn’t be able to look at me. After the detective and all the curious neighbors and both of our hysterical mothers had left for the night, is when he would cross the room without a word and raise his hand and bring it across my cheek. For a second, I didn’t know what had happened. No one had ever slapped me.

The next day, there was a bruise, and though I’d tried to cover it with makeup, you could still see it, a purple cloud with little red streaks of broken capillaries inside, like a way-off storm, one you can hear and smell long before the rain ever gets to where you are. I’d planned to tell everyone I’d risen in the middle of the night and fallen down the stairs, but when they saw me, they didn’t ask. Even the detective, when he came for his second round of questioning, didn’t say a word. It was as if they’d expected it, as if this were natural in the chain of events: first lost boy, then bruised mother. I knew then that they thought I deserved it, which is what I’d thought all along, but hadn’t said.   

 

The dam, when it cracks, won’t affect our neighbor, as far as I can tell. His house is on a hill, and the water will likely flow right under his rickety bridge. At one time, the river came through here, slow and steady, Brian tells me, before the dam, before people hundreds of miles away needed electricity for their light bulbs and televisions, for all their black boxes that do nothing without it. What I have learned is that when the river returns, it won’t be the same river. All that time pushing against a wall will make you desperate. All that time, and you won’t care about this tidy home or that. If you are the river, you will say, show me a thing I can’t destroy, and if you are the dam, and you are tired of pushing back, you will secretly want to let go.

Now, as I cross the bridge, I think of Brian. At home, he is probably digging up our dead garden. There was a freak frost and then a dry spell and then some kind of bug that made lace of all the leaves. The garden was sad-looking for a while, and then one morning we woke up and everything was shriveled and bent over. Somehow it is my fault. This is understood.

Once I’m across, I stand on our neighbor’s doorstep, a plate of muffins balanced on my palm. At my feet is my empty pie tin, which I take as a good sign. I knock and then knock again and call brightly, “Hellooo!” with my nose to the window. Birds startle from a nearby tree, but no one comes to the door. I imagine the old man asleep in his rocker, the radio spinning the static that has always reminded me of rain. Better to let him sleep.

But as I crouch to leave the plate of muffins and retrieve my pie tin, I hear footsteps, slow and deliberate. I freeze. My heart begins to pound. Suddenly, I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to meet whoever opens the door. I want to go home to Brian and forget about making friends, just live out the rest of our days talking only to the dogs. I calculate how far it is to the truck, how long it would take me to get there, slinking through the bushes, my shoes in my hand. But it’s too late for that.

The door swings open, and I am squatting eye to eye with a little blond girl.

“Mom!” she yells into my face. “That lady’s here again!”

From around the corner, footsteps and then tan, slender legs and manicured toes. I look up and there’s a dark-haired woman holding a baby in what looks like a very uncomfortable position for the baby. One leg folded up, the other dangling. One arm smashed into its side. The woman’s hair is cut into a fashionable bob and in her ears are tiny diamond studs like the ones I used to wear. In her hand is a tightly wrapped diaper the size of a softball. “Excuse me,” she says, and then hurls the diaper over my head and into the bushes behind me.

I stand and turn, and we all watch the diaper bounce once and disappear.

“Good throw,” I say.

“Sorry. If I put them in the trash, the whole house starts to smell rotten. I’m Lisa,” she says and thrusts out her hand, the one the diaper was in. I hesitate, but then shake it anyway.

“We told you,” the little girl says, not taking her eyes off me. “We told you it was a lady.”

“We told you!” comes another voice from somewhere inside the house.

“You were right, you were right, congratulations. Now take him, go play.” Lisa sets the baby teetering on the floor. The little girl tries to take his hand, but he wails and shakes it loose. “Fine!” the little girl shouts and runs off. The baby looks up at me and then over at his mother. Lisa hooks her thumb toward the living room and makes a clicking sound in the corner of her mouth like cowboys do to wrangle horses. The baby knows what this means. He takes off down the hall, his arms splayed for balance.

“No TV,” Lisa says to me, shaking her head. “They may all get murdered.”

“We don’t have it either,” I say. “I miss The Bachelor.”

“And Real Housewives.”

“Project Runway.” We both nod and say “mmm” as if we are eating something delicious.

“Sorry about the other day,” she says. “I was dealing with a poop-meets-wall situation. The pie was good. We had it for dinner.”

I shoo her compliment away with my hand. There’s no way that pie was good. It was the first one I ever made, and it was lumpy and caved-in and the crust was burnt. But it was meant for an old man who probably ate beans out of a can all day and would have appreciated anything. “I thought a guy lived here,” I say. “An older guy? With gray hair?”

“Oh, he died. End of April, I think. A stroke, maybe? Now his son rents out the place. We’re here for June, calling it ‘family time.’ Which means right now my husband is stumbling around drunk in the woods with a loaded rifle, and me and the kids are here with no TV. Just having a ball.” Though she says this wryly, I can tell she’s a good mother, even in the wilderness. She loves her kids, who are all safely unlost in the living room.

“That’s terrible,” I say.

“Eh. We get by. ”

I meant the old man and his stroke, but I let it slide. I picture the last time we saw him, his old rusted truck chuffing up the hill, his thin frame slumped over the steering wheel. It seems like just the other day. But now I’m wondering how long ago it really was. The days, I think, might be slipping by me.

Lisa leans against the doorframe and raises her leg to scratch a mosquito bite on her ankle. She does it with her fingers in the shape of a V, scratching around the bite like her mother probably taught her. “How long are you here for?” she wants to know.

“For good,” I say. “We live down the hill.”

“Oh. Oh, I see.” I can tell she feels sorry for me, that she can’t imagine living in a place without restaurants and movie theatres and coffee shops, and I want to tell her that I can’t either, that all of this seems like it’s happening to someone else. The real me, I know, is back in the city eating at Spiro’s and cutting Cody’s spaghetti into little pieces. The real me is walking down a street and seeing herself in all the broad windows and thinking at least ten different easy things, none of which are garden or dam or stroke. But I know how she must see me: the cutoffs and work shirt, the tennis shoes caked with mud, and before I can tell her about living in the city, about my hair that was cut just like hers, and my own pair of diamond stud earrings buried somewhere in a drawer, before I can begin convincing her that she and I would have been friends, we hear from inside a loud thud and then a slap and then the baby begins to cry.

Lisa yells over her shoulder, “You better work it out before I work it out for you!”

We hear a chorus of shushes and some shuffling. Then a lone, muffled “sorry.”

“I better go,” Lisa tells me. “They’re probably feeding him poison.”

“Ha,” I say, “rat poison,” trying to be funny. And then immediately regret it. If Brian were here, he would be frowning now and looking down to toe the dirt. But Lisa snorts and I can tell she is laughing even though she’s covered her mouth with her hand. “Those little pellets!” she squeals between her fingers.

At home, Brian has taken down the front shutters and laid them across two sawhorses. He’s meticulously scraping away the flaking paint with a flat tool that looks like a sandbox toy. What I never knew about Brian before, but have learned since we’ve been here, is that he is never bored. He can always, always find something to do, even if that something is a terrible waste of time like scraping paint off shutters no one will ever see but us. “How did it go?” he asks.

I know I should come clean about the old man and his rented house filled with kids—I even want to tell him about Lisa and her diaper softball—but here is what I say instead: “I don’t think Cody’s feeling very well. He may have had a small stroke.”

“Oh,” he says, scraping. “You were gone a long time.”

“He had me get some high things off a shelf.”

Brian blows away the paint and runs his hand across the raw wood. This is his trick, to pretend he isn’t listening.

“He’s in a wheelchair. Did I tell you that?”

He stops and turns to me. The flakes of paint in his hair make him look ten years older. “But we just saw him driving.”

“I guess since then he’s had the chair. He said the pie was delicious.”

“Good for you,” he says, not unkindly. I think for a minute he is actually going to smile at me. The corners of his mouth are turning up, but instead of feeling relieved, I feel like I am watching a wounded animal try to run. I can’t help but grimace. Brian sees the look on my face and rearranges his mouth into a skeptical line. “What did you say his last name is? This Cody?”

“I didn’t.”

“But he has one?”

“Of course he has one. He’s a person, isn’t he?”

Brian squints and fingers his temple. He turns back to his scraping. “I think that’s what we’re saying.”

The second lie I told on the day I lost my son was about a hat. I told the detective he was wearing one—a blue baseball cap with an orange fish on the front. I said this because it was a hot day, nearly ninety degrees in the city, and when we arrived at the park, I saw all of the other kids were wearing hats and even tiny pairs of sunglasses. I felt guilty about Cody’s little cheeks, which immediately began to pink, and I felt even guiltier later, when the detective started with his questions. I didn’t want to seem like a bad mother, even though it would be established eventually that I was, so I made up the part about the hat and watched him write it down on his little notepad. After he left, I could hardly breathe because I knew what I had done. The police would be looking for a little boy in a blue hat and would never find Cody, who was terribly, terribly hatless. The room around me began to come unstitched at the edges, and a strange sound made its way to my throat. I wheeled around, trying to find Brian to tell him what I’d done. Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe we could find the detective and take back the part about the hat. But then Brian crossed the room without a word and took his palm to my cheek and everything slammed back into place like a carnival ride come to its end.

They never found Cody. At the end of the summer, Brian moved in with a friend because he said he needed some time, but I knew he just didn’t want to see my face. People used to say Cody looked just like me, which I’d always denied for Brian’s sake but took a secret pleasure in. Now I wished I could wipe away my features with one of those Magic Erasers used to clean chunks of food from kitchen baseboards. If I could, I’d trim down my nose and tuck away at my chin and leave myself only thin wisps for brows. Maybe then my husband wouldn’t wince every time he looked at me.

After Brian moved out, I stopped showering. And then I stopped eating. And a little while after that, I counted fifteen blue pills into my palm and took them slowly, with just enough water so that I didn’t throw them back up.

When I woke in the hospital, Brian was holding my hand. In the corner, a monitor showed my pulse in steady peaks. I knew I shouldn’t make a joke, but I couldn’t stand the blue vein of worry running down the middle of his forehead. “Drats,” I said, despite myself. “So much for subtlety.”

“Stop it,” Brian said, and then, “Listen.” He massaged his beard until the hairs stood on end. “I’ll come back,” he said, “but we have to get out of the city.”

And what could I say? Could I say no, Brian, let’s go back to our apartment where there is Cody’s empty bed and his dresser filled with too many multi-colored T-shirts, so many they are spilling from the drawers, so many you might mistake them for a string of handkerchiefs, the kind magicians slowly pull from their mouths, a trick to make you believe something small and bright can go on forever.

I couldn’t say that. I couldn’t say anything. So I just nodded and closed my eyes and let Brian sell our things and move us to this place where I have dreams that a wall of water is rushing towards us. Sometimes I can hear a humming that seems to come from two places at once: from far down the creek and also somewhere inside me, as if the dam is as much aware of me as I am of it. As if I need only to step onto the porch and open my arms.

 

When I emerge from the house having showered and wearing mascara, my hair pulled back into a knot at my neck, Brian raises his eyebrows. He’s on the porch teaching himself how to whittle. The dogs, who are sleeping at his feet, are covered in shavings. The piece of wood in his hand looks a little like a person and a little like a penis. “Again?” he asks. “You were just there yesterday.”

“Cody’s sick,” I say. “It’s sad.” I walk past him, but he gets up and follows me, the dogs at his heels. I climb inside the truck and roll down the window. Brian leans inside the cab, excavating the grime under his nails with his pocketknife. For a moment, I’m reminded of my husband as a younger man. Back then, if I ever canceled a date, he would show up anyway with a cheap bouquet and sit on my doorstep. My roommates would step over him on their way in or out and report back. “He’s just sitting there,” one would say. “It’s creepy.” But I didn’t think it was creepy. I thought it was proof he loved me.

“This Cody,” he says. “He’s how old?”

“I don’t know. Seventyish.”

He scans the inside of the truck. “And he’s fine with you showing up uninvited? He doesn’t have something better to do?”

“Believe it or not,” I say, “some people actually like talking to me. Because I’m nice. And funny. And if you stopped hating me long enough—”

“Come on,” Brian says. “You’re being ridiculous.”

“No. I’m not.” I start the truck, but he doesn’t move. He’s trying to get me to stop being ridiculous by convincing me how ridiculous I am. “You’re all dressed up!” he says. “You’re wearing perfume!”

“I have green eyes! I have two arms!” I flail them around in a variation of jazz hands. “Do you have a point? Or are you just making observations?”

“You’re different,” he says, his eyes like stones.

I remember the slap, the sting of his palm on my cheek. It was the last time he touched me on purpose. “Well, you were different first,” I say and put the truck in gear, but he stands his ground. He leans into the door and even crosses his arms over the window’s threshold. His lip is turning up at the corner and it could almost be a smile, but it isn’t.

I think of Lisa’s little girl trying to hold the hand of the baby brother who doesn’t want her. At the moment, though, I’m not sure which one of us she is. I gun it, and the truck lurches forward. Brian yelps and jumps back, and I can see him in the rearview mirror with his arms raised, and the dogs are barking and leaping straight up into the air as if he has signaled them, as if this is their cue to perform. But I am already halfway up the hill, and the sound of the engine is the only sound I hear.

Across the bridge, the front door is flung wide. In the kitchen, Lisa and the kids look up from their cereal and stare at me.

“It was open,” I say.

They all turn to look pointedly at the baby, who is swirling Cheerios around on his highchair tray. “It’s his new thing,” Lisa says. “He’s figured out about locks.”

Everyone looks a little glazed over, although it’s almost noon. Lisa wears thick eyeglasses and a spiky ponytail. The little girl and a little boy I haven’t seen yet are both naked but for their underwear. I lean awkwardly against the refrigerator for a few seconds, and then Lisa seems to rally. “Judith,” she says to the little girl. “Scootch.” Obediently, Judith slides into the next chair. “You hungry? We’ve got all kinds,” Lisa says, shaking a cereal box in my direction.

I tell her no thanks and that I’m heading to town, that I can bring her back something if she needs it.

“Actually,” she says and begins rummaging around in some cabinets. She’s wearing an oversized T-shirt that barely covers her rear. The backs of her legs are red and sweaty from the vinyl seat of her chair. “Do you think you could bring me a couple of cans of—”

“Lisaaaaa!” The sound that comes from the other end of the house is more like a growl than someone’s name. Though she has her back to me, I see Lisa’s shoulders tense, the stiffening of her arms, how her fingers clench into claws. At the table, the little boy has knocked over his bowl. Pink milk drips onto the floor.

“Lisaaaa!”

“Shit,” Lisa says.

“Shit,” Judith says.

“Mom?” says the little boy.

Lisa turns to him. “It’s fine. He probably just wants to know who’s here.” She looks at me. “Can you watch them? Just for a minute?”

  I nod fervently. To show I’m qualified, I pull some paper towels from the roll on the table and begin sopping up the puddle on the floor. Lisa disappears around the corner, and the baby twists in his highchair to watch her go. We hear the bedroom door open and then the click of the lock.

Judith refills the boy’s bowl with Fruity Pebbles. “That’s our dad,” she says. “He’s sleeping it off.”

In his highchair, the baby begins to whimper. His chin quivers, and he smashes his palms into his eyes.

“No, no,” I say, “everything is fine. Look! Look at these yummy Cheerios!” I give them a little swirl, but the baby is having none of it. He wants his mother, and it’s clear to me even before the minutes begin to tick by that she’s going to be awhile. I unhitch him from his chair and set him on the ground, but this, it seems, is a terrible decision. He gives me a look that says, This? Now this? and collapses on the kitchen floor. He wails into the linoleum, his fingers flexing against the shiny squares. Judith and the little boy have come to stand by me, and we all watch the baby writhe on the floor.

“Well?” Judith says, looking up at me.

There is nothing to do but pick him up, which I realize I have been avoiding. And now I know why. He immediately finds the curve of my shoulder and buries his head there, his face shellacked to my neck by a thin layer of drool. The kids wander into the living room, and the baby and I do a lap around the kitchen. He clenches my shirt in his wet fist and makes a noise like a car alarm but very, very far away.

Somewhere, across a distance, I am sitting on a park bench. I look away for a moment, and my son is gone. This is what is written in the police report. This is what I told Brian and the detectives and anyone else who asked. I’ve never said that I leaned my head back and closed my eyes. I’ve never said that I’d forgotten my sunglasses, and that the sun threw dappled shadows on my eyelids. No one knows that for maybe half an hour before I faded into sleep, I listened to my son playing nearby with another child, the sound like birds chasing each other in the trees.

In the kitchen, the baby’s head lolls against my shoulder. Muffled voices funnel down the hall. The children in the living room march tiny horses along the windowsills. At home, Brian is probably dismantling some part of the house. I see his face, his paint-flecked beard, his expression as he crossed the room that day to strike me. It is the same look he would give me if he saw me holding this baby—the confusion and anger and fear—as if by holding him, I am forgetting about our son. I am losing Cody all over again. Inside me, something small but essential begins to break. Heat seeps and brims in the pit of my stomach. I think of Brian on my doorstep all those years ago. He wasn’t angry or jealous. He didn’t ever demand to know where I’d been. He only ever wanted to trust me. I feel a rising in my throat—bile or a scream, I don’t want to find out. What is clear is that I cannot hold this baby a second longer. I pry my shirt from his fist and lay him down on the kitchen rug. Then I slip quietly out the door.

When I reach the bottom of the hill, I turn right instead of left and park the truck alongside the creek. I leave my shoes in the cab and climb down the embankment to stand ankle-deep in the water. Even in summer, the creek is cold, but the ache in my toes is better than the heat in my stomach. I keep my back to the dam. I think of Lisa and what she will do when she emerges from the bedroom to find her son on the floor. I think of her husband and of my own husband and how it seems no matter where we are lost—whether in the woods or the city or the park—the hardest part is never finding our way back. The hardest part is explaining the moment when we strayed.

That day in the park, I could hear Cody’s voice moving away from me. I told myself he was fine, the park was safe. I told myself I deserved a few minutes alone with the sun and with the trees moving overhead. On the shore of sleep, I thought of stupid things—a blouse I’d seen in a store window, all the potential colors of my hair. I have always thought I would know if my son were in trouble, the way you can sometimes anticipate the ringing of the phone or what song will play next on the radio, that my scalp would tingle or the hairs on my arms would stand on end. But when I opened my eyes, I still didn’t know he was gone. I gathered my things. I looked in all his favorite places. What are we, I want to know, if we are not connected to each other? What keeps us here?

Behind me, the dam is holding back every drop it was built to contain. Its concrete walls are eight feet thick. It is designed to collapse in and not out. Brian told me this. He meant to comfort me with this information. He meant to help me sleep. But what can he do about the dreams? The wall of water rushing towards us? And what about the dream I haven’t told him yet, the one where I sit beside the woman who is sleeping on the bench? The one where I watch our son walk away. What can he do as our son looks up and takes a stranger’s hand? What can he do as Cody takes a step, and then another? This, I know, is how the years will reveal themselves. This is how the time will pass. Always, our son will look back over his shoulder as he moves away. Always, his mother will sleep beside me, on and on through the years, her head tilted back as if she is watching something very small and very high moving in the air above her.